RAPIDLY expanding Israeli air strikes across the Gaza Strip killed more than 700 people in the previous 24 hours, health officials said yesterday, as medical facilities across the territory were forced to close because of bombing damage and a lack of power.

The soaring death toll from Israel’s escalating bombardment was unprecedented in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And there could be an even greater loss of life once Israeli ground forces backed by tanks and artillery launch an expected offensive into Gaza, aimed at crushing Hamas.

Israel said yesterday that it had launched 400 air strikes over the past day, claiming to have killed Hamas commanders, hitting militants as they were preparing to launch rockets into Israel and striking command centres and a Hamas tunnel shaft. The previous day, Israel reported 320 strikes.

Witnesses and health officials said many of the air strikes hit residential buildings, some of them in southern Gaza where Israel had told civilians to take shelter.

An overnight strike hit a four-storey residential building in the southern city of Khan Younis, killing at least 32 people and wounding scores of others, according to survivors.

The fatalities included 13 from the Saqallah family, said Ammar al-Butta, a relative who survived the air strike. He said there were about 100 people there, including many who had come from Gaza City, which Israel has ordered civilians to evacuate.

“They were sheltering at our home because we thought that our area would be safe. But apparently there is no safe place in Gaza,” he said.

Fifteen members of another family were among at least 33 Palestinians buried on Monday in a shallow, sandy mass grave at a Gaza hospital after being killed in Israeli air strikes.

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Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said the killed at least 704 people, including 305 children and 173 women.

More than 5700 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel including some 2300 minors, the ministry said. That includes the disputed toll from an explosion at a hospital last week. The fighting has killed more than 1400 people in Israel.

As the death toll in Gaza spiralled, facilities to deal with the casualties were dwindling. A total of 46 out of 72 healthcare facilities – including 12 out of 35 hospitals – stopped functioning, the World Health Organisation said.

Palestinian health officials said the lack of electricity and fuel to power generators from the Israeli blockade, as well as damage from air strikes, has forced many of the facilities to close.

While Israel has allowed a small number of trucks filled with aid to enter, it has barred deliveries of fuel to Gaza.

Israel says it does not target civilians and that Hamas militants are using them as cover for their attacks. Palestinian militants have fired more than 7000 rockets at Israel since the start of the war, Israel said, and Hamas said it fired a new barrage yesterday morning.

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Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “We continue to attack forcefully in Gaza City and its environs, where Hamas is building up its terrorist infra- structure, where Hamas is arraying its troops.

He again told Palestinians to head south “for your personal safety”.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said six of its staff were killed in bombings, bringing to 35 the death toll of its workers since the war started.

Amid fears the fighting could spiral into a wider regional war, French president Emmanuel Macron arrived in Tel Aviv yesterday. He told top

Israeli officials that he came “to express our support and solidarity and share your pain” as well as to assure Israel it is “not left alone in the war against terrorism”.

In a joint news conference with Macron, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would make every effort to fight the war quickly, “but it could be a long war”.

On Monday night, Hamas released two elderly Israeli women who were among the more than 200 people Israel says were taken to Gaza during the attack.

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Appearing weak in a wheelchair and speaking softly, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz told reporters yesterday that the militants beat her with sticks, bruising her ribs and making it hard to breathe as they kidnapped her.

They drove her into Gaza, then forced her to walk several miles on wet ground to reach a network of tunnels that looked like a spider’s web, she said.

Once there, though, her treatment improved, she said. Lifshitz, whose husband remains a hostage, said conditions were kept clean, she received medical care, including medication, and was given the same one meal a day of cheese and cucumber that her captors had.

Lifshitz and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper were freed days after an American woman and her teenage daughter were freed. Hamas and other militants in Gaza are believed to have taken roughly 220 people, including an unconfirmed number of foreigners and dual citizens.

Hamas released a video showing the handover, with militants giving drinks and snacks to the dazed but composed women, and holding their hands as they are walked to Red Cross officials. Just before the video ends, Lifshitz reaches back to shake one militant’s hand.

Around the same time, Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, released a recording showing Hamas prisoners – most in clean prison uniforms, but one in a bloody T-shirt and at least one wincing in pain – sitting handcuffed in drab offices talking about the October 7 attack.

The men said they were under orders to kill young men, and kidnap women, children and the elderly, and that they had been promised financial rewards. The Associated Press could not independently verify either video, and both the hostages and the prisoners could have been acting under duress.