Oct. 31 (UPI) — The Palestinian Ministry of Health called for increased aid as the death toll in Gaza rose Tuesday after Israel expanded its ground operations.
The health ministry said 8,525 people have been killed since Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after an Oct. 7 surprise attack by the militant group killed 1,400 Israelis.
It said 216 people had been killed from Monday to Tuesday, claiming many of those killed had been displaced south of the Gaza Strip in areas Israel had designated as “safe zones.”
Another 21,543 people were injured. while the health ministry said it had received reports of 2,000 missing people.
The health ministry said 15 hospitals and 32 primary care centers had been forced out of service amid the fighting and a lack of fuel.
“We appeal to our people to immediately go to donate blood in all hospitals and blood bank branches in the Gaza Strip,” the ministry said. “We demand the International Committee of the Red Cross to work on providing large quantities of blood units from outside the Gaza Strip to meet the needs of hospitals.”
The United Nations on Monday urged the opening of a second humanitarian border crossing to provide aid to Palestinians in need, noting that the small amounts of supplies that have maid their way through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt could not address the overwhelming need.
Juliette Touma, the communications director for the United Nations Agency for Palestinians said on Monday an agency worker, his wife, and eight children died in the Gaza Strip.
As we were preparing remarks of [Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] to the U.N. Security Council, we received the dreadful news. Our colleague Samir was killed with his wife and eight children,” Touma wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“We mourn him and his family. 64 colleagues were killed in Gaza. UNRWA will never be the same without them RIP.”
Israel said on Tuesday it had expanded its ground operations and struck 300 targets, including anti-tank missile and rocket launch posts below shafts, as well as military compounds inside underground tunnels belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization.
The Israeli Defense Forces added that a fighter jet strike killed Nasim Abu Ajina, the commander of Hamas’s Beit Lahia Battalion who directed the attack on Israelis on Oct. 7 in Kibbutz Erez and Moshav Netiv Ha Asara.
The IDF said Ajina in the past had been in charge of Hamas’s drone and paraglider attacks.
“During the forces’ ground operations, the soldiers had several engagements with terrorist cells that fired both anti-tank missiles and machine gun fire toward them,” the IDF said in a statement. “The soldiers killed terrorists and directed air forces to real-time strikes on targets and terror infrastructure.”
In an update, IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus said Israel was currently focusing its efforts on northern Gaza which is “the center of gravity of Hamas” but would continue operations throughout the territory.
“We are hunting their commanders, we are attacking their infrastructure,” he said.
Conricus added that he believed Israel would be “ramping up the facilitation of humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip.
“We do understand that the situation there is difficult, but this isn’t our doing and this isn’t what we wanted,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had said earlier that it would not agree to a humanitarian cease-fire despite calls from the U.N. and other international bodies to allow increased aid into Gaza.
“Calls for a cease-fire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism,” he said.
