Health officials said the Israeli military bombed at least five crowded homes in northern Gaza on Thursday with many casualties as troops deepened an incursion along the territory’s northern edge.

The medics said rescue operations were underway as many people remained missing or trapped under the rubble.

Hamas media put the number of fatalities at 57, but there was no official figure immediately from the Gaza health ministry.

The Israeli military made no immediate comment but has repeatedly accused Hamas media of exaggerating the number of casualties.

Earlier on Wednesday, Gaza health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 48 people.

Gaza medics said the incidents included attacks on houses and a school sheltering displaced people in central Gaza, bombing of a hospital in northern Gaza and air strikes on the humanitarian designated area of Al-Mawasi and Rafah in southern Gaza.

Palestinian and UN officials have said that no place in the enclave was safe.

Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, one of three medical facilities barely operational in the besieged northern area, said the hospital “was bombed across all its departments without warning, as we were trying to save an injured person in the intensive care unit on Tuesday.

“Following the arrest of 45 members of the medical and surgical staff and the denial of entry to a replacement team, we are now losing wounded patients daily who could have survived if resources were available,” he told Reuters by text message. “Unfortunately, food and water are not allowed to enter, and not even a single ambulance is permitted access to the north.”

There were 85 injured people, including children and women, at the hospital, six in the ICU.

Seventeen children had arrived with signs of malnutrition as a result of food shortages, and one man died of dehydration a day ago, Abu Safiya added.

Israeli operations in Gaza have focused for weeks on the northern edge of the territory, where the military has laid siege to three major towns and ordered residents to flee.

Residents in the three towns—Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun—said Israeli forces had blown up dozens of houses.

Palestinians say Israel appears determined to depopulate the area permanently to create a buffer zone along the northern edge of Gaza, which Israel denies.

According to Gaza officials, Israel’s 13-month campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 44,000 people and displaced nearly all the enclave’s population at least once.

(Reuters/NAN)