Starvation is Imminent - UN warns as aid supplies to Gaza are halted again

UN aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again on Friday November 17, due to shortages of fuel and a communications shutdown, increasing the misery of thousands of hungry and homeless Palestinians as Israeli troops battled Hamas militants in the enclave.

The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) said civilians faced the "immediate possibility of starvation" due to the lack of food supplies.

With the war between Israel and Hamas about to enter its seventh week, there was no sign of any slow down despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least for humanitarian pauses.

Palestinian news agency WAFA said a number of Palestinians were killed and others injured in an Israeli strike that hit a group of displaced people near the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Al Jazeera TV cited sources as saying that nine people were killed in the strike. Al Jazeera also said that at least 18 Palestinians were killed after an Israeli strike hit a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

Israel's military, which has concentrated its assault on northern Gaza, said its troops and war planes were keeping up pressure on Friday.

Overnight they took control of an Islamic Jihad commander's stronghold, it said, and also killed Hamas fighters inside a school where they found a large number of weapons.

Earlier, Israel said its troops had found a tunnel shaft used by Hamas at Al Shifa hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip.

The hospital, packed with patients and displaced people, has become a major focus of global concern. Israel says Hamas has stored weapons and ammunition and is holding hostages in a network of tunnels under hospitals like Shifa, using patients and people taking shelter there as human shields. Hamas denies this.

The war was triggered by a cross-border raid by Hamas militants on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, in the deadliest day in the state's 75-year-history.

More than 11,500 Palestinians, at least 4,700 of them children, have now been killed in Israel's retaliatory military assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry - a toll that far surpasses previous bouts of conflict in recent years.