Israel Expands Ground Assault into Gaza as Fears Rise over Airstrikes near Crowded Hospitals

Israeli troops and armor pushed deeper into northern and central Gaza on Monday, as the UN and medical staff warned that airstrikes are hitting closer to hospitals where tens of thousands of Palestinians have sought shelter alongside thousands of wounded.
Video obtained by the Associated Press showed an Israeli tank and bulldozer in central Gaza blocking the territory's main north-south highway, which the Israeli military earlier told Palestinians to use to escape the expanding ground offensive.
When asked whether forces had positioned on the road, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said “we expanded our operations" but would not comment on specific deployments.
The video shows a car approaching an earth barrier across the road, where a tank is parked behind a small building. The car stops and turns around. As it heads away, the tank appears to open fire, and an explosion engulfs the car.
The journalist who was filming the scene from another car races away in terror, screaming, “Go back! Go back!” at an approaching ambulance and other vehicles. The Gaza Health Ministry later said three people were killed in the struck car.
The Israeli advances put their forces on both sides of Gaza City and the surrounding areas of northern Gaza, in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “second stage” of the war ignited by Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 incursion. Casualties on both sides are expected to rise sharply as Israeli forces and Hamas group battle in dense residential areas.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain in the north and would no longer be able to escape if the north-south highway is blocked. Around 117,000 displaced people are staying in hospitals in northern Gaza, alongside thousands of patients and staff, hoping they will be safe from strikes, according to UN figures.
Most residents heeded Israel's orders to flee to the southern part of the besieged territory, but many stayed in part because Israel has also bombarded targets in so-called safe zones.
The death toll among Palestinians passed 8,000, mostly women and minors, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The toll is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence. More than 1.4 million people in Gaza have fled their homes.
Over 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during Hamas' initial attack, also an unprecedented figure.
Israeli forces appeared to be driving deeper into Gaza from the north. Video released Monday by the military showed armored vehicles moving among buildings and soldiers taking positions inside a house.
Hagari said additional infantry, armored, engineering and artillery units had entered Gaza and the operations would continue to “expand and intensify,” though Israel has stopped short of calling its operations an all-out invasion.
The military said Monday that overnight its troops had killed dozens of militants who attacked from inside buildings and tunnels. It said that in the last few days, it had struck more than 600 militant targets, including weapons depots and anti-tank missile launching positions. The reports of targeting could not be independently confirmed.
Hamas’ military wing said its militants clashed with Israeli troops who entered the northwest Gaza Strip with small arms and anti-tank missiles. Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel, including toward its commercial hub, Tel Aviv.
Also Sunday, the largest convoy of humanitarian aid yet — 33 trucks — entered southern Gaza from Egypt. Relief workers say the amount is still far less than what is needed in the territory, where the population of 2.3 million people has been running low on food, water, medicine and fuel after weeks under Israeli siege.
On Saturday, crowds of people broke into four UN facilities and took food supplies in what the UNcalled a sign that civil order was starting to break down amid increasing desperation.
Israel’s siege has pushed Gaza’s infrastructure nearly to collapse. With no central power for weeks, hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, has been trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running. Last week, UN officials said hunger was growing.
The increase in aid trucks came after US President Joe Biden emphasized to Netanyahu “the need to immediately and significantly” increase the entry of humanitarian aid, the US said.
Israel also opened two water lines in southern Gaza within the past week, according to the Israeli military body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs. The Associated Press could not independently verify that either line was functioning.
Communications were restored to most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people Sunday after more than a day without phone and internet services.
Meanwhile, crowded hospitals in northern Gaza came under growing threat. Strikes hit near Gaza City's Shifa and Al Quds hospitals and the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza in recent days, the UN and residents said Monday.
All 10 hospitals operating in northern Gaza have received evacuation orders in recent days, the UN's office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs said. Staff have refused to leave, saying evacuation would mean death for patients on ventilators.
Tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering in Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital but has not provided much evidence. Hamas denies the allegations.
Strikes hit within 50 meters (yards) of Al Quds Hospital after it received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate, the Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said. Some windows were blown out, and rooms were covered in debris. It said 14,000 people are sheltering there
Israel says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger.
The military escalation has increased domestic pressure on Israel’s government to secure the release of 239 hostages seized by Hamas fighters during the Oct. 7 attack.
Hamas says it is ready to release all hostages if Israel releases all of the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Desperate family members of the Israeli captives met with Netanyahu on Saturday and expressed support for an exchange. Israel has dismissed the Hamas offer.
“If Hamas does not feel military pressure, nothing will move forward,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told families of the hostages Sunday.
The fighting has raised concerns that the violence could spread across the region. Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have engaged in daily skirmishes along Israel’s northern border.
In the West Bank, Israel said its warplanes carried out airstrikes Monday against militants clashing with its forces in the Jenin refugee camp, the scene of repeated Israeli raids. Hamas said four of its fighters were killed there. As of Sunday, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 115 Palestinians, including 33 minors, in the West Bank, half of them during search-and-arrest operations, the UN said.
The Israeli military said early Monday that its aircraft hit military infrastructure in Syria after rockets from there fell in open Israeli territory. Syrian opposition groups said strikes destroyed three trucks entering eastern Syria from Iraq, and soon after Iranian-backed militias fired rockets at US positions in Syria.
Roughly 250,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes because of violence along the border with Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon, according to the Israeli military.

Sudan's army chief visited on Sunday his headquarters in the capital Khartoum, two days after forces recaptured the complex, which paramilitaries had encircled since the war erupted in April 2023.

"Our forces are in their best condition," Abdel Fattah al-Burhan told army commanders at the headquarters close to the city center and airport.

The army's recapture of the General Command of the Armed Forces is its biggest victory in the capital since reclaiming Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city on the Nile's west bank, nearly a year ago.

In a statement on Friday, the army said it had merged troops stationed in Khartoum North (Bahri) and Omdurman with forces at the headquarters, breaking the siege of both the Signal Corps in Khartoum North and the General Command, just south across the Nile River, reported AFP.

Since the early days of the war, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) quickly spread through Khartoum, the military had to supply its troops inside the headquarters via airdrops.

Burhan was himself trapped inside for four months before emerging in August 2023 and fleeing to the coastal city of Port Sudan.

The recapture of the headquarters follows other gains for the army.

Earlier this month, troops regained control of Wad Madani, just south of Khartoum, securing a key crossroads between the capital and surrounding states.

'Disregard for human life'

With the army gaining ground in central Sudan, the RSF has set its sights on consolidating its hold on Darfur, where it controls every state capital except El-Fasher.

Despite besieging it since May, the paramilitary has not managed to wrest control of the city from the army and its allied militias.

Days after it issued an ultimatum demanding army forces and their allies leave the North Darfur state capital, an attack on the city's Saudi Hospital on Friday killed 70 people and injured dozens, the United Nations said on Sunday.

"The attack, reportedly carried out by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on the only functional hospital in El-Fasher, is a shocking violation of international humanitarian law," the UN's resident and humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said Sunday.

"The alarming disregard for human life is unacceptable," said the UN's most senior official in Sudan.

The RSF on Sunday accused the army and its allies of striking the hospital.

The late Friday drone strike destroyed the hospital's emergency building, a medical source told AFP.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X the "appalling" attack took place while "the hospital was packed with patients receiving care".

Both sides have been accused of targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas, with the RSF specifically accused of ethnic cleansing, systematic sexual violence and laying siege to entire towns.

The United States announced sanctions this month against RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, accusing his group of committing genocide.

A week later, it also imposed sanctions against Burhan, accusing the army of attacking schools, markets and hospitals, as well as using food deprivation as a weapon of war.

'The best medicine is peace'

The war in Sudan has unleashed a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and, according to the United Nations, more than 12 million uprooted.

Famine has been declared in parts of Sudan but the risk is spreading for millions more people, a UN-backed assessment said last month.

Particularly in the country's western Darfur region and in Kordofan in the south, families have been forced to eat grass, animal fodder and peanut shells to survive.

"Above all, Sudan's people need peace. The best medicine is peace," Ghebreyesus said.

During Sunday prayers in Rome, Pope Francis lamented how the country has become the site of "the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world".

He called on both sides to end the fighting and urged the international community to "help the belligerents find paths to peace soon".

Israel Expands Ground Assault into Gaza as Fears Rise over Airstrikes near Crowded Hospitals