Palestinians plea for help as Israeli strikes ravage north Gaza

Israel has pummeled Gaza new bombardments that killed at least 20 people, Palestinian medics said, a day after one of the deadliest single strikes in Tel Aviv's year-long war killed scores in the enclave's north.

Eight of Wednesday's victims were killed in a strike on the Salateen area of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. The area is near where medics said at least 93 people were killed or missing on Tuesday in an Israeli strike Washington called "horrifying".

The Israeli military assault that has laid waste to Gaza and killed tens of thousands of people shows no signs of slowing as Israel wages a new war in Lebanon and its backer the United States tries after a year of failed attempts to broker ceasefires for both.

Northern Gaza, where Israel claimed in January it had dismantled Palestinian resistance group Hamas's command structure, is currently the focus of the military's assault. It sent tanks into Beit Lahia and the neighbouring towns of Beit Hanoon and Jabalia earlier this month to flush out Hamas fighters who it said had regrouped in the area.

The new attack has killed hundreds of Palestinians, medical workers say, and has choked aid and food supplies to their lowest level since the beginning of the Israeli assault.

Officials in Beit Lahia issued a statement urging world powers and aid agencies to halt Israel's attacks and bring in basic medical supplies, fuel and food, saying the latest military actions had left the area "without food, without water, without hospitals, without doctors".

Dr Eid Sabbah of Beit Lahia's Kamal Adwan hospital said the bodies and injured people remained trapped under rubble.

Disastrous impact

He said the destruction of hospitals and lack of medical supplies meant doctors and nurses mostly had no chance of saving people who came in with injuries from air strikes and gunfire.

"Whoever is injured, just lies there on the ground and whoever is killed can't be transported, except by mule-drawn cart," he said.

Meanwhile, Israel's decision this week to ban the UN relief agency UNRWA from operating on its territory could have a disastrous impact on humanitarian efforts in Gaza, UN officials said.

As families fled the Beit Lahia area last week, parents wheeled children in prams and wooden carts and dragged suitcases through the mud. Israel earlier in October told residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes or face missile strikes.

Dalia al Kharawat, a mother-of-five from Jabalia, begged locals in Gaza City to let her stay and now sleeps in the open-air car park of a destroyed building with her children.

"When we need to sleep, we go here in the rubble, the sand, the broken glass. There is no place at the school shelters," she said.

Israel has bombed schools where homeless families are staying on a number of occasions, according to Palestinian hospital workers in Gaza.