Palestinians bid farewell to loved ones at Gaza City's Al-Ahli Arab hospital, also known as the Baptist hospital, following an Israeli airstrike that hit an UNRWA school, serving as a shelter for people who left their homes in the besieged Palestinian territory. AFP
"Civil defence teams have transferred (to hospitals) at least 44 dead, mostly children and women, as well as dozens of wounded" across Gaza since 1:00 am (2200 GMT Monday), agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
Bassal said eight were killed in a strike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City and 13 in a strike on a house in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
Another 15 were killed in a strike on a gas station near the Nuseirat refugee camp and nine in a strike on a house in the Jabalia refugee camp.
Two other strikes in the southern city of Khan Younis killed 10 people, according to Nasser Hospital, AP reported.
Israel's security cabinet approved earlier this month a plan to expand its attacks on Gaza, which one official said would include the "conquest" of the territory and the displacement of its population.
"We will take control of all the territory of the strip," Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.
Israel resumed its war across Gaza on March 18, unilaterally ending a two-month ceasefire that had largely halted the genocidal war.
Aid trickled into the Gaza Strip on Monday for the first time in more than two months, following intense international condemnation over Israel's total blockade that has sparked shortages of food and medicine.
Netanyahu said Israel needed to prevent a famine in Gaza for "diplomatic reasons", after his government announced it would allow limited food aid into the territory.
He said aid had resumed because "images of mass starvation" could harm the legitimacy of Israel's war effort.
Aid trickles in
On Friday, President Donald Trump of the United States, Israel's strongest ally and main arms supplier, acknowledged that "a lot of people are starving" in Gaza.
"We're looking at Gaza. And we're going to get that taken care of," Trump told reporters in Abu Dhabi, on a regional tour that excluded Israel.
The World Health Organization warned that Gaza's "two million people are starving".
The leaders of Britain, France and Canada issued a condemnation of Israel's conduct of the war, slamming its "egregious actions" in Gaza, particularly the expanded offensive and the "wholly inadequate" resumption of aid.
They warned of "concrete actions" if Israel did not ease its stepped up offensive.
A group of 22 countries, including France, Britain, Canada, Japan and Australia said in a joint statement that Gaza's population "faces starvation" and "must receive the aid they desperately need".
Israel announced it would let limited aid into Gaza and said the first five trucks entered Monday carrying supplies "including food for babies".
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said in a statement that nine trucks had been "cleared to enter... but it is a drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed".
On the ground, the Israeli occupation army issued a new evacuation order to Palestinians around Khan Younis in southern Gaza ahead of what it called an "unprecedented attack".
Since it resumed strikes on March 18, Israel has killed at least 3,340 people, taking the war's overall toll to 53,486, mostly children and women.
Killing ‘babies as a hobby’
Criticism against Israel's conduct in Gaza came also from inside the country, with Yair Golan a leader of Israel's center-left politics saying on Tuesday that Israel was becoming an “outcast among nations" because of the government's approach to the war.
“A sane country doesn’t engage in fighting against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby and doesn’t set for itself the goals of expelling a population,” Yair Golan, a retired general and leader of the opposition Democrats party, told Reshet Bet radio, AP reported.
His comments were rare criticism from within Israel of its wartime conduct in Gaza. Many Israelis have criticized Netanyahu throughout the war, but that has been mostly limited to what opponents argue are his political motives to continue the war. Criticism like Golan's, over the war's toll on Palestinian civilians, has been almost unheard.
Golan has before likened the atmosphere in Israel to that of Nazi-era Germany.
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