Israeli strikes in Gaza kill 70 as UN chief calls civilians’ plight ‘unbearable’

Approximately 70 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the past day, health officials in Gaza said, as Israel’s renewed campaign in the north of the strip shows no sign of slowing despite the revival of ceasefire talks after a three-month-long hiatus.

Separately, one person was killed when a truck rammed into a bus stop in Ramat Hasharon, north of Tel Aviv, on Sunday, in what Israeli police are treating as a suspected terrorist attack. About 40 people were injured to varying degrees, some seriously, and were taken to nearby hospitals, police said.

The Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad praised the suspected attack but did not claim it.

The driver of the truck was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, police said, and was “neutralised” by passersby carrying firearms.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli military said a Palestinian man was killed after he tried to stab a group of soldiers in the occupied West Bank town of Hizma.

Related: Iran’s supreme leader says military should decide how to respond to Israeli attack

Information about the situation in northern Gaza has become increasingly sporadic and difficult to verify as Israel’s new ground and aerial assault focusing on Jabaliya, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun enters its fourth week.

Internet and phone services have been down for hours at a time, and civil defence workers have been unable to reach the sites of recent strikes due to Israeli forces’ ever-tightening siege and attacks on their crews.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew from Kamal Adwan hospital, one of only three still operating in the area, on Sunday morning after raiding the compound a day earlier. Staff said dozens of male health workers and some patients had been detained.

The death toll from an Israeli airstrike on Beit Lahia on Saturday evening rose to 40 on Sunday, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. Another strike on houses in Jabaliya on Sunday morning killed 20 people, and 11 more people were killed in the bombing of a school turned shelter in the Shati area of Gaza City, the health ministry in the previously Hamas-controlled territory said.

In statements, the IDF said they had “eliminated over 40 terrorists” in Jabaliya, and they disputed the death toll in Beit Lahiya, which they said did not align with the “precise munitions” used.

Israel launched a new ground and aerial offensive on northern Gaza on 6 October that it says is necessary to mop up Hamas cells that have regrouped. Sweeping evacuation orders for the 400,000 people who the UN estimates still live there, the blockage of aid and food deliveries and the targeting of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals have led rights groups to accuse Israel of the war crime of seeking to forcibly displace the remaining population.

Israel has denied it is systematically removing Palestinians from the area or using food as a weapon, both of which are illegal under international law.

In a statement on Sunday, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called the plight of civilians trapped by the fighting in north Gaza “unbearable”.

His office said: “The secretary general is shocked by the harrowing levels of death, injury and destruction in the north, with civilians trapped under rubble, the sick and wounded going without life-saving healthcare and families lacking food and shelter.”

The head of the Mossad, David Barnea, was expected to travel to Qatar on Sunday for meetings aimed at restarting ceasefire and hostage release negotiations. The indirect talks, mediated by Qatar, the US and Egypt, broke down after the death of Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh in a bombing in Iran believed to have been carried out by Israel. Hostilities with Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah have since overshadowed the peace process in Gaza.

The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October 2023 attack, in the strip this month was presented by the international community as an opportunity to restart negotiations. Sinwar, who had the last word on Hamas’s position, had repeatedly blocked progress towards a deal.

Later on Sunday, family members of the approximately 100 Israeli hostages who remain captive in Gaza disrupted a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu at a televised memorial event for victims of the Hamas attack, forcing the Israeli prime minister to stop his address.

Many in Israel blame Netanyahu for the intelligence and response failures of 7 October and accuse him of dragging his heels on a deal in Gaza to bring the hostages home for political reasons.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese health ministry said that at least 21 people were killed on Sunday in Israeli strikes on three different areas in southern Lebanon.

Nine people were killed and 38 wounded in a strike on Haret Saida, near the port city of Sidon, the ministry said, with at least seven others including a nurse and three rescuers killed in the southern village of Ain Baal, and five in Burj al-Shemali.

Israel’s military claimed on Sunday it had killed 70 Hezbollah fighters, and it issued a new wave of evacuation orders to villages that it said hosted Hezbollah military infrastructure.

It also announced that five Israeli soldiers had been killed in the fighting in Lebanon, and another had died from wounds sustained in north Gaza.