Israeli air strike on Gaza's Rafah kills more Palestinians: medics

Israeli forces killed at least 12 Palestinians in a dawn air strike on Rafah in southern Gaza and fighting raged in several other areas of the coastal enclave, medics in Gaza have said.

Israel pressed on with its brutal offensive on Thursday on Rafah a day after saying its forces had taken control of a buffer zone along the nearby border between Gaza and Egypt, giving it effective authority over Gaza's entire land frontier.

Medical sources in Gaza said the 12 Palestinians, whom it said were civilians, had been killed and an unspecified number of others wounded in an Israeli air strike as they tried to recover the body of a civilian in the centre of Rafah.

Another Palestinian civilian was killed in an air strike on the Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City in the north of the densely populated enclave, the medics said.

Israel reported clashes in southern, central and northern Gaza but did not immediately comment on the reported deaths in Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians took refuge earlier in the war.

Israel has kept up raids on Rafah despite an order by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the top UN court, to halt its attacks.

Incipient famine

More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's air and land war in Gaza, with 53 of those killed in the past 24 hours, the Health Ministry in the besieged enclave said.

The United States, Israel's closest ally, reiterated its opposition to a major ground offensive in Rafah on Tuesday but said it did not believe such an "operation" was under way.

The US has, with Egypt and Qatar, been involved in efforts to mediate indirect talks between Israel and Hamas on arranging a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages. Those talks have stalled, with Israel's invasion of Rafah.

As the war drags on, malnutrition has become widespread in Gaza as aid deliveries have slowed to a trickle, and the United Nations has warned of incipient famine.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), also called for an end to what he said were Israeli attacks on UNRWA staff and buildings in Gaza.

In an article for the New York Times, he said Israeli officials were "delegitimising UNRWA by effectively characterising it as a terrorist organisation", and he described a "dangerous precedent of routine targeting of UN staff and premises."