GAZA: The Gaza Strip’s health ministry said Wednesday the death toll from the war with the Zionist entity now tops 21,000, with a spokesman reporting 195 deaths over 24 hours. The Zionist entity again pounded Gaza with air strikes and shelling after its military chief warned the war raging with Hamas since the Palestinian group’s Oct 7 attacks will last “many more months”.

Explosions lit up the sky over the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis — a focus of heavy urban combat since the Zionist army said it had largely gained control over Gaza’s north. A strike hit a house near Al-Amal hospital in Khan Yunis, killing 22 people and wounding 34, the Gaza health ministry said. Heavy firefights also raged again around Gaza City in the north, while an air strike wounded 11 people near Rafah, a far-southern city crowded with internally displaced people, witnesses said.

Gaza’s spiraling humanitarian crisis has amplified calls for an end to the hostilities. Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to keep up the campaign to destroy Hamas. “This war’s objectives are essential and not simple to achieve,” armed forces chief Herzi Halevi said Tuesday. “Therefore, the war will continue for many more months.”

The Zionist campaign has killed at least 21,110 people, according to the latest toll issued by Gaza’s health ministry, about two thirds of them women and children. The army said the number of Zionist soldiers killed inside Gaza had risen to 164.

Gaza’s 2.4 million people have suffered severe shortages of water, food, fuel and medicines, with only limited aid entering the territory. An estimated 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced, the UN says. AFPTV footage showed Palestinians who had been sheltering in a UN-run school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp fleeing south, seeking safety from the bombardment.

Displaced Gazans “don’t know where to go”, said one of them, declining to be named. “First, we’re displaced to Nuseirat, then to Rafah.” Even schools “are no longer safe” in Gaza, said the man. “A solution must be reached... Implement a ceasefire instead of bringing in aid.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in an interview on Egyptian television, charged that the Gaza war “goes beyond a catastrophe and a genocide”. “Netanyahu’s plan is to get rid of the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority,” said Abbas, who is based in the occupied West Bank. The UN Security Council, in a resolution last week, called for the “safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale”. The resolution, which did not call for an immediate end to the fighting, effectively leaves the Zionist entity with operational oversight of aid deliveries.

In Rafah, hundreds turned up at the Abdul Salam Yassin water company carrying baskets, pulling handcarts and even pushing a wheelchair stacked with bottles to queue for clean water. “This was my father’s cart,” said Rafah resident Amir Al-Zahhar. “He was martyred during the war. He used it to transport and sell fish, and now we are using it to transport fresh water.”

Elsewhere in Rafah, people split logs and stacked kindling as the lack of fuel forced them to burn wood for cooking and to keep warm. Internet and telephone services that were cut on Tuesday were gradually being restored in central and southern areas of Gaza, the Palestinian telecommunications company Paltel said on X, formerly Twitter.

Violence has also flared across the West Bank, with more than 310 Palestinians killed by Zionist troops or settlers since Oct 7, the health ministry there said. A Zionist operation in a refugee camp in the northern West Bank killed six people early Wednesday, it said, with the army saying it had struck the Nur Shams camp from the air. “Six martyrs killed by the occupation and some who were seriously wounded were transported to the Thabet Thabet government hospital in Tulkarem,” the ministry said in a short statement.

The war has reverberated across the Middle East, drawing in armed groups backed by the Zionist entity’s arch foe Iran in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. A Zionist air strike on a Lebanon border town killed a Hezbollah fighter, the group said Wednesday, with state media reporting two of his relatives were also killed. Hezbollah later Wednesday said it launched a barrage of 30 rockets towards the Zionist entity “in response to the enemy’s repeated crimes”.

In Syria, a Zionist strike Monday killed Iranian general Razi Moussavi, a senior commander in the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran has vowed to avenge the death of Moussavi, whose body was due to be repatriated for burial after memorial prayers at the Shiite holy sites in Iraq on Wednesday.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have repeatedly fired at the Zionist entity and at passing cargo ships in the Red Sea in attacks in solidarity with Hamas. US military forces shot down more than a dozen Houthi attack drones and several missiles, the Pentagon said, reporting no casualties or damage. The Zionist military said Tuesday a fighter jet over the Red Sea had intercepted “a hostile aerial target that was on its way to (Zionist) territory”.