The death toll in the Gaza Strip has increased following the latest airstrikes on the Palestinian territory, where the Israeli military is working to root out the leaders of Hamas following the attack on southern Israel almost four months ago.
New figures came as a United Nations official accused Israel’s navy of striking an aid convoy carrying food destined for hard-hit northern Gaza.
The food convoy was waiting to move into northern Gaza when it was hit by Israeli naval gunfire on Monday morning, Thomas White, the Gaza director of UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said in a post on the X, formerly Twitter, platform.
Mr White posted images showing a truck parked on the roadside with damage to its cargo. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which said it was looking into the report.
Juliette Touma, head of communications at the agency UNRWA, said no one was injured in the strike, which took place north of the area of Wadi al-Balah in central Gaza.
The UN says it has struggled to send aid to war-torn northern Gaza, which Israel pummelled in the first weeks of the war, because of the ongoing fighting.
Monday’s incident came after more than a dozen countries, including the US, announced they would suspend funding to UNRWA over Israeli allegations that 12 of its 13,000 Gaza employees participated in the October 7th attacks against Israel, which set off the war.
However, Spain’s foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, has said his government will give €3.5 million to the agency to help it maintain its activities in the short term.
On Sunday, strikes hit two houses and a mosque in central Gaza, killing 29 people and wounding at least 60 others.
Separate airstrikes in Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city, killed two children, ages 12 and two, according to the registration office at the hospital where the bodies were taken.
Israel’s military said it raided the headquarters of Hamas’s brigade in the southern city of Khan Younis and found what it called training materials for the October 7th attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
The materials included “models simulating entrance gates of Israeli kibbutzim, military bases and IDF armoured vehicles”, the military said.
The offensive in Gaza that Israel launched in response to the attack had killed 27,365 people and wounded more than 66,000 in Gaza as of Sunday morning, the Hamas-ruled territory’s Health Ministry reported.
The Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, but says most of those killed were women and children.
In the occupied West Bank Israeli police say officers shot and killed a Palestinian boy who allegedly attempted to stab them.
Police said the paramilitary border police were carrying out a routine security check in an area east of Jerusalem when a 14-year-old allegedly pulled out a knife and attempted to stab the officers. The officers opened fire, shooting the teenager, and were uninjured, police said.
The White House has urged Israel to make a greater effort to avoid harming civilians and to allow more aid into besieged Gaza.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken returned to the region this week for his fifth visit since the conflict broke out, beginning on Monday in Saudi Arabia and with planned stops in Egypt, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank.
Later on Monday, a top French official said France was working to get proof that medicines shipped to Gaza for dozens of hostages held by Hamas have been delivered.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said France was working with Qatar and other partners in the region “to get all elements of proof to know whether the medicines have been received” by the hostages.
A shipment intended for the hostages arrived in Gaza on January 18 as part of a deal mediated by France and Qatar that represented the first agreement between Israel and Hamas since a weeklong ceasefire in November.
France said at the time that the deal called for providing a three-month supply of medication for 45 hostages with chronic illnesses, as well as other medicines and vitamins.
Authorities said three French nationals were believed to be among the more than 100 remaining hostages currently held by Hamas and other militants in Gaza.
