KHAN YUNIS, Gaza Strip — Internet and telephone services collapsed across the Gaza Strip on Thursday for lack of fuel, the main Palestinian provider said, bringing a potentially long-term communications blackout even as Israel signaled its offensive against Hamas militants could next target the south of the territory, where most of the population has taken refuge.
Meanwhile, Israeli troops for a second day searched Shifa Hospital in the north for traces of Hamas. They displayed what they said were a tunnel entrance and weapons found in a truck inside the compound. But the military has yet to release any evidence of a central Hamas command center that Israel has said is concealed beneath the complex. Hamas and staff at the hospital, Gaza’s largest, deny the allegations.
The military said it found the body of one of the hostages abducted by Hamas, 65-year-old Yehudit Weiss, in a building adjacent to Shifa, where it said it also found assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. It did not give the cause of her death.
The communications breakdown largely cuts off the territory’s 2.3 million people from one another and the outside world, worsening the severe humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza, even as Israeli airstrikes continue there. International pressure is growing on Israel to allow pauses in fighting to let in aid, with food, water and electricity increasingly scarce. The United Nations World Food Program warned of “the immediate possibility of starvation” in Gaza as the food supply has broken down under Israel’s seal and too little is coming from Egypt.
Most of Gaza’s population is crowded into the territory’s south, including hundreds of thousands who heeded Israel’s calls to evacuate from the north to get out of the way of its ground offensive. If the assault moves into the south, it is unclear where they would go, as Egypt refuses to allow a mass transfer onto its soil.
The war, now in its sixth week, was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which the militants killed at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured about 240 men, women and children. Weiss, the woman whose body was found Thursday, is the third hostage confirmed dead, while four others have been freed and one rescued.
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Israel responded to the attack with a weeks-long air campaign and a ground invasion of northern Gaza, vowing to remove Hamas from power and crush its military capabilities.
More than 11,470 people have been killed, two-thirds of them women and minors, according to Palestinian health authorities. An additional 2,700 have been reported missing, believed buried under rubble. The official count does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths, and Israel says it has killed thousands of militants.
Fifty-six Israeli soldiers have died during the ground offensive, Israel says.
The war has inflamed tensions elsewhere. In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a checkpoint on the main road linking Jerusalem to Israeli settlements, killing a soldier and wounding three people.
The three attackers were killed, according to police, who said the assailants had assault rifles, handguns and hatchets, and were preparing a large-scale attack in Jerusalem. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.
A day after storming into Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli troops continued searching the complex. Gaza’s Health Ministry said the troops searched underground levels of the hospital Thursday and detained technicians who run its equipment.
The hospital has not had electricity for nearly a week, and staffers say they have been struggling to keep alive 36 premature babies and 45 dialysis patients with equipment not functioning.
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Shifa’s director, Muhammad Abu Salima, told Al Jazeera that a dialysis patient died Thursday, adding that 650 wounded and 5,000 displaced people were in the hospital amid the raid.
Israel said its soldiers brought medical teams with incubators and other supplies, though Shifa staff said incubators were useless without fuel. Gaza’s Health Ministry said 40 patients, including three babies, died before the raid after the emergency generator ran out of fuel Saturday.
During previous days of fighting in the nearby streets, there was no report of Hamas fighters firing from inside Shifa, and no fighting when Israeli troops entered Wednesday.
Israel faces pressure to prove its claim that Hamas set up its main command center in and under the hospital, which has multiple buildings over an area of several city blocks. So far, it has mainly shown several caches of weapons.
On Thursday, the military released video of a hole in the hospital courtyard it said was a tunnel entrance. It also showed several assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition clips and utility vests laid out on a blanket that it said were found in a pickup truck in the courtyard. The Associated Press could not independently verify the Israeli claims.
For years, Israel has depicted the hospital as the site of a major Hamas headquarters. In recent weeks it released satellite maps that specified particular buildings as a command center or as housing underground complexes. It released a computer animation portraying a subterranean network of passageways and rooms filled with weapons and fuel barrels. The U.S. said it has intelligence to support Israeli claims.
The allegations are part of Israel’s broader accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields across the Gaza Strip — which it says is the reason for the large numbers of civilian casualties during weeks of bombardment.
The military says it has largely consolidated its control of the north, though fighting continues there. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday that the ground operation will eventually “include both the north and south. We will strike Hamas wherever it is.” He did not give a time frame.
Israeli forces dropped leaflets Wednesday afternoon telling Palestinians in areas east of the southern town of Khan Yunis to evacuate. Similar leaflets were dropped over Gaza’s north for weeks ahead of the ground invasion.
Strikes continued Thursday in the south. In the city of Deir al Balah, a funeral was held for 28 people killed in an overnight bombing that leveled several buildings.
A southern offensive would bring Israeli forces into a zone packed with the vast majority of Gaza’s population. They include some 1.5 million people displaced from their homes, living in overcrowded U.N. shelters or with other families.
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In past weeks, the Israeli military has called on people to move to a “safe zone” in Mawasi, a town on the Mediterranean coast a few square miles in size, where humanitarian aid could be delivered.
The heads of 18 U.N. agencies and international charities on Thursday rejected the creation of a safe zone and said they would not participate.
In a joint letter, the groups said that concentrating civilians in a zone while hostilities continue was too dangerous. They called for a cease-fire and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid and fuel for Gaza’s population. The groups included the U.N. humanitarian chief, the children’s agency UNICEF, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization.
Israel has sealed off Gaza since the start of the war, allowing in only a trickle of aid from Egypt. It also bars delivery of fuel, saying it will be diverted to Hamas — though it allowed a small amount this week for U.N. trucks to use in delivering aid.
The World Food Program said the 447 trucks that have brought food into Gaza from Egypt — out of 1,129 relief trucks total since Oct. 21 — provide less than 7% of the population’s daily caloric needs. Bread is “scarce or non-existent” after fuel shortages shut down most bakeries, and food supply chains have collapsed, it said.
“With winter fast approaching, unsafe and overcrowded shelters and the lack of clean water, civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said.
Palnet, the main Palestinian telecom provider, said the network in Gaza ground to a halt Thursday after running out of fuel. General manager Abdulmajeed Melhem said the company has made international appeals for fuel, but the network can be restored only if Israel lets supplies in.
That raises the potential for a long-term communications blackout. Gaza authorities have been able to get the system working after three previous shutdowns.
The Israel-Hamas war will be high on the agenda when President Biden and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping meet Wednesday in San Francisco.
The previous blackouts traumatized Palestinians, leaving them unable to call ambulances after strikes hit homes or reach family members to ensure they are alive. Aid workers say the shutdowns wreak havoc on humanitarian operations and hospitals.
Some Palestinians manage to keep up communications using satellite phones or SIM cards that reach Israeli or Egyptian networks. The cutoff also makes it harder for international media to cover events on the ground.
Associated Press writers Amy Teibel, Melanie Lidman, Najib Jobain and Kareem Chehayeb contributed to this report.
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