Displaced Palestinians, who fled their house due to Israel's military offensive, shelter in a tent, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.

Gun battles between Israel and militants from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and smaller Palestinian factions intensified overnight into some of the fiercest in months in both northern and southern Gaza, both sides said on Wednesday.

Israeli tanks reached densely populated neighborhoods and narrow alleyways of the militant stronghold of Jabalia in the northeast, facing heavy resistance. Residents said the army destroyed clusters of homes there in areas where they had not invaded before.

The armed wing of Hamas ally Islamic Jihad said its militants killed and wounded Israeli foot soldiers during fierce clashes in eastern Jabalia, the biggest of eight refugee camps built in Gaza after the 1948 Middle East Arab-Israeli war.

"The invaders are trying to destroy the camp. They are bombing houses on top of their inhabitants. We know of many families being trapped inside their homes," said Abu Jehad, a resident of the camp who gave a nickname, fearing reprisals.

The Israeli military said it had begun an operation overnight against "terrorist operatives and infrastructure" in the centre of Jabalia.

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"Over the past day, IDF troops in the area have engaged in intense battles with dozens of terrorist cells and eliminated a large number of terrorists," a statement said, including some it said had fired towards the Israeli city of Sderot on Tuesday.

Gaza's Civil Emergency Service and health ministry said rescue teams have been unable to reach areas where the army was operating to respond to calls for help.

Abu Jehad said the militants were putting up a fierce fight.

"Our fighters are teaching painful lessons, we hear the explosions, yes they have planes and tanks but our fighters are defending Jabalia, the cradle of the revolution as it has always been known," he told Reuters via a chat app.

In Rafah - the city in southernmost Gaza where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering from fighting elsewhere, troops continued to operate in the eastern Al-Salam and Jeneina neighbourhoods and also in southeast, residents said.

They said troops and tanks were trying to move towards the center of Rafah but were being met with heavy resistance from Hamas-led gunmen.

Israel said its troops began targeting a Hamas training compound in eastern Rafah, killing militants in close-quarters combat and finding large amounts of weapons and equipment intended to simulate that of the Israeli defence forces.

It said earlier that a soldier had been killed in combat in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. A reporter for public broadcaster Kan said this was the first military fatality in Rafah since the start of the ground operation there last week.

Israel has ordered civilians to evacuate parts of Rafah, and UNRWA, the main United Nations aid agency in Gaza, estimates some 450,000 people have fled the city since May 6. More than a million civilians had sought refuge there.

They are moving to places such as Al-Mawasi, a sandy coastal area that aid agencies say lacks sanitary and other facilities to host displaced people.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Wednesday that families were being forcibly displaced again by Israeli forces evacuation orders and enhancing military operations.

"Despite catastrophic humanitarian needs, access restrictions and lack of safe passage obstruct efforts of humanitarian organisations to reach people across the Gaza Strip," the agency said on X.

Hamas Attacks Israeli Forces Next to UNRWA School in Jabalia Camp

Hamas’s militant wing, the Qassam Brigades, released video on Wednesday, May 15, depicting large explosions targeting Israeli forces next to an UNRWA school in the Jabalia Camp area of northern Gaza.

In a statement several hours earlier, Hamas said its fighters had carried out a “complex operation” that targeted an Israeli military bulldozer and soldiers inside a house. When an Israeli tank arrived in response, the fighters struck it with anti-tank weapons, the statement read.

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Hamas said the operation killed at least 12 Israeli soldiers, but Storyful could not independently verify those claims.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had not remarked on the incident at the time of writing, but earlier said it had been engaged in “intense battles” in the east Jabalia Camp area.

The video was released a day after Israeli forces struck an UNRWA school building in Nuseirat, reportedly killing dozens, in what the IDF said was a targeted attack on Hamas militants inside. Credit: Qassam Brigades via Storyful.

Gaza fighting intensifies, Israel asks why armed men were at UN site

Israeli troops battled militants across Gaza on Wednesday, including in the southern city of Rafah that had been a refuge for civilians, in an upsurge of the more than seven-month-old war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Antagonism between Israel and the United Nations worsened as the Israeli army sought an explanation for footage showing armed men next to U.N. Palestinian relief agency vehicles. Separately, India was working to bring home the body of a U.N. staffer killed in Rafah by what the global body said was tank fire.

Israeli forces have in recent days pressed into the east of Rafah in pursuit of what they say are four Hamas battalions despite warnings by Israel's main ally, the United States, to hold off to avoid mass civilian casualties.

The U.S. also wants Israel to produce a clear plan for Gaza's future, a position that Secretary of State Antony Blinken underlined by saying neither Israeli occupation nor Hamas governance were acceptable.

"We also can't have anarchy and a vacuum that's likely to be filled by chaos," Blinken said during a visit to Ukraine.

The remarks drew an apparent Israeli riposte, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying post-war planning was impossible without first completing the demolition of Hamas.

Netanyahu was later publicly challenged over post-war plans for Gaza by his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who said he had tried to promote a blueprint for an alternative Gaza administration made up of Palestinians, but "got no response" from various decision-making cabinet forums under Netanyahu.

"I call on the prime minister to announce that Israel willnot rule over Gaza militarily," Gallant said. "An alternative toHamas governance should be established"

In an apparent response, Netanyahu said any move to establish an alternative to Hamas as the government of Gaza required that the Palestinian Islamist group first be eliminated, and demanded this goal be pursued "without excuses".

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RISING DEATH TOLL

Since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, Israel's Gaza offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, with at least 82 killed on Tuesday in the highest single-day toll for weeks.

Hamas-led gunmen killed some 1,200 people and abducted 253 in their Oct. 7 raid into Israel, according to Israeli tallies.

With fighting picking up across Gaza, residents said Israeli tanks had destroyed clusters of homes in the northern Jabalia district but faced heavy resistance from Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad.

Islamic Jihad said it had killed some foot soldiers in Jabalia. Israel's military said it had eliminated many gunmen in the area, where it declared major operations over months ago.

Israeli tanks have been massed around the eastern edges of Rafah and in recent days have been probing into built-up areas of the city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering from fighting elsewhere.

Residents said Israeli forces had pushed into three neighbourhoods and Palestinian gunmen were trying to prevent soldiers and tanks moving towards the centre.

Israel reported one death in southern Gaza which public broadcaster Kan said was the first such fatality since the start of the Rafah ground operation last week. Netanyahu told the broadcaster CNBC that the operation could last weeks.

In the north, Israel said it had concluded an operation in the Zeitoun area, killing "dozens of terrorists". Residents said tanks had pulled back from the area, with dozens of homes destroyed or damaged, while Palestinian medics said dozens of civilians had been killed and wounded.

An Israeli strike hit a gathering of people outside a Gaza City shop that provides an internet signal for customers to call and check on relatives and friends, killing at least three people and wounding more than 20, medics said.

An Israeli air strike killed a local journalist, Hayel Al-Najar, and three of his family in his house in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, medics and fellow journalists said.

INVESTIGATION INTO U.N. FATALITY

Israel said its troops had identified fighters in the central logistics compound of the U.N. Palestinian relief agency UNRWA east of Rafah, demanding an explanation. Reuters verified the location of video released by the Israeli army but could not verify when it was filmed or the identity of the men.

"The U.N. has in part become a terrorist entity in itself because it cooperates with Hamas and covers for it," Israel's ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan told Army Radio.

UNRWA has denied cooperating with Hamas.

An UNRWA spokesperson said the agency could not verify the authenticity or content of the video or the exact timing or location, but it was likely that the video showed an UNRWA warehouse in Rafah that staff left in the week of May 6.

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters the men were there to protect aid distribution.

"These are false allegations and lies. This is a police force tasked with securing aid centres against acts of theft and looting," Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

The U.N. is investigating a strike on a car in Rafah this week that killed its first international staff member since Oct. 7, a retired Indian army officer en route to the European Hospital. It blamed tank fire in an area where only Israeli tanks were present.

The Israeli military said an initial inquiry had concluded the vehicle, whose route it was unaware of, had been hit in an active combat zone and the incident was under review.

Some 254 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the war began, including 191 U.N. staff, according to the U.N..

As the fighting intensifies, ceasefire talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt are at a stalemate, with Hamas demanding a permanent end to attacks and Netanyahu's government saying it will not stop until the group is annihilated.

Gaza death toll: how many Palestinians has Israel's campaign killed?

Aftermath of an Israeli strike on a house in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip.

Palestinian health authorities say Israel's ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven most of the enclave's 2.3 million people from their homes.

The war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants stormed across the border into Israeli communities. Israel says the militants killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragged 253 into captivity in Gaza.

This explainer examines how the Palestinian death toll is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

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HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH TOLL?

In the first months of the war, death tolls were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on, and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

A May 7 Health Ministry report gave an overall toll of 34,844. It said 21,058 of those deaths were counted from bodies that hospitals reported arriving at morgues. Another 3,715 were deaths reported online by family members who had to input information including identity numbers.

It listed the remaining 10,071 deaths as having "incomplete data". Omar Hussein Ali, head of the ministry's emergency operations centre in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said these were bodies that had arrived at hospitals or medical centres without personal data such as identity numbers or full names.

IS THE GAZA DEATH TOLL COMPREHENSIVE?

The numbers "do not necessarily reflect all victims due to the fact that many victims are still missing under the rubble", the Palestinian Health Ministry says. In May it estimated that some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.

The U.N. human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health have also said during the conflict that the true figures are likely higher than those published.

HOW CREDIBLE IS THE GAZA DEATH TOLL?

Pre-war Gaza had robust population statistics and better health information systems than in most Middle East countries, public health experts told Reuters.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organisation said the ministry has "good capacity in data collection/analysis and its previous reporting has been considered credible".

The United Nations regularly cites the ministry's death toll figures, while naming the ministry as the source.

Early in the conflict, after U.S. President Joe Biden cast doubt on casualty figures, the health ministry published a detailed list of the 7,028 deaths that had been registered by that point.

Academics looking at details of listed casualties said in a peer-reviewed article in the Lancet medical journal in November that it was implausible that the patterns shown in the list could be the result of fabrication.

However, there are specific questions over the inclusion of 471 people said to have been killed in an Oct. 17 blast at al-Ahli al-Arab hospital in Gaza City. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report estimated that death toll "at the low end of the 100 to 300 spectrum".

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DOES HAMAS CONTROL THE FIGURES?

While Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, the enclave's Health Ministry also answers to the overall Palestinian Authority ministry in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Gaza's Hamas-run government has paid the salaries of all those hired in public departments since 2007, including in the Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority still pays the salaries of those hired before then.

The extent of Hamas control in Gaza now is difficult to assess with Israeli forces occupying most of the territory, including around locations of major hospitals that provide casualty figures, and with fighting ongoing.

WHAT DOES ISRAEL SAY?

Israeli officials have said the figures are suspect because of Hamas' control over government in Gaza. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Mamorstein said the numbers were manipulated and "do not reflect the reality on the ground".

However, Israel's military has also accepted in briefings that the overall Gaza casualty numbers are broadly reliable.

Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war.

HOW MANY CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED?

The Health Ministry figures do not differentiate between civilians and Hamas combatants, who do not wear formal uniform or carry separate identification.

Israel periodically provides estimates of how many Hamas fighters it believes have been killed. The most recent was Netanyahu's estimate of 14,000.

Israeli security officials say such estimates are reached through a combination of counting bodies on the battlefield, intercepts of Hamas communications and intelligence assessments of personnel in targets that were destroyed.

Hamas has said Israeli estimates for its losses are exaggerated but has not said how many of its fighters have been killed.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says more than 70% of the dead are women and children under 18. For most of the conflict its figures showed children as representing slightly over 40% of all those killed.

However, conditions in hospitals compiling figures have worsened amid the fighting and many of those killed may not be identifiable due to their injuries.

In May the ministry updated its breakdown of the fatalities to be based only on the 24,686 bodies it said had been fully identified, and not on the more-than 10,000 bodies it said have not yet been identified.

When it made this change, the numbers appeared significantly less, prompting Israel to raise further questions over the figures.

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