Israel bombed southern Gaza Saturday as the UN warned the besieged Palestinian territory has been rendered "uninhabitable" by three months of war.
The fighting, triggered by the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants, has sent tensions soaring across the region, and shows no signs of abating with the conflict entering its fourth month on Sunday.
Civilians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have borne the brunt of the violence amid widespread displacement, destruction and a deepening humanitarian crisis.
With swathes of the territory already reduced to rubble, UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said Friday that "Gaza has simply become uninhabitable".
AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes early Saturday on the southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.
On Israel's northern border, Lebanon's Hezbollah group said it launched on Saturday its "initial response" to the killing of Hamas's deputy chief in Beirut, which a US defence official has told AFP was carried out by Israel.
The Iran-backed group said it had targeted the Israeli military's Meron air control base with 62 missiles, while the Israeli army reported "approximately 40 launches from Lebanon" early Saturday, with sirens blaring in the Galilee region.
Contacted by AFP, a military spokesperson confirmed the mountaintop base had been targeted but did not say whether it was damaged. No casualties were reported in Israel.
The Hamas-allied Lebanese movement has been trading near-daily fire with Israeli forces since early October and said the barrage was a response to Tuesday's killing of Saleh al-Aruri in a strike on Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
The army said it had struck Hezbollah "military sites" in response.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said late Friday that Israeli forces were maintaining a "very high state of readiness" along the border with Lebanon following Aruri's killing, which Israel has not claimed.
In Gaza, Hagari said, the army continues "to fight ... in the north, centre and south".
Palestinian man Abu Mohammed, 60, who fled to Rafah from the central Bureij refugee camp, told AFP that as the war nears its fourth month, Gaza's future appeared "dark and gloomy and very difficult".
- 'More than 20' deaths in family -
The war began with Hamas's unprecedented attack which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
The militants also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel, including at least 24 believed to have been killed.
In response, Israel has launched a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,722 people, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said it had recorded more than 120 deaths over the past 24 hours.
Victims of renewed Israeli bombardment were brought Saturday to the European hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis, where relatives and mourners gathered.
One of them, Mohamed Awad, wept over the body of a 12-year-old boy.
He counted the deaths in his family. "My brother, his wife, his children, his relatives and the brothers of his wife -- there are more than 20 martyrs," Awad, a journalist, told AFP.
Another Palestinian journalist, Akram El-Shafei, has died at the hospital from wounds sustained in Gaza City in November, making him "the 117th journalist... killed by the Israeli occupation during this crazy war", according to Asser Yassin of the Palestinian Media Forum.
Yassin said Israel "directly targets journalist" but that it "only increases our determination to... convey the suffering and pain" to the world.
Israeli officials have rejected allegations that the army deliberately targets members of the press.
Shafei's condition had initially improved, said relative Magda El-Shafei, but he "needed treatment" and there was "nothing" available.
"He's gone," she told AFP.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says the majority of the Palestinian territory's 36 hospitals have been put out of action by the fighting, while remaining medical facilities face dire shortages.
A UN team on Friday delivered medical supplies to Gaza authorities in Khan Yunis, and WHO coordinator Sean Casey said it was "the first time we've been able to make this delivery in about 10 days."
The Israeli military on Saturday said its ground and air forces had "killed numerous terrorists ... and destroyed a number of tunnel shafts" in Khan Yunis over the past 24 hours.
Israel says Hamas militants hide in a vast underground network as well as among civilians in schools and hospitals.
Hamas -- listed as a "terrorist" group by the United States and the European Union -- denies charges of using hospitals as shelters for its fighters.
The army said that during "a targeted raid" in Gaza City, now a largely devastated urban combat zone, troops had found military vests "concealed... in a medical clinic".
- Diplomatic push -
Top Western diplomats were in the region as part of a fresh push to raise the flow of aid into Gaza and calm rising tensions.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Turkey on Saturday at the start of his fourth regional tour since the war began.
He will also visit several Arab states before heading to Israel and the occupied West Bank next week, and plans to discuss with Israeli leaders "immediate measures" on aid, according to a State Department spokesman.
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh called on Blinken to focus his visit on "ending the aggression" and said US support for Israel has enabled "unprecedented massacres and war crimes against our people in Gaza."
Haniyeh, based in Qatar, added in a video message shared by his office that "the future and stability of our region are closely linked to our Palestinian cause."
Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was also due in the region on Sunday, and the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell was meeting Lebanese leaders on Saturday in Beirut.
burs-ami/it