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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli troops fighting in the Gaza Strip on Monday, vowing to stay the course of the war even as the death toll mounts. His trip came hours after Gazan health officials reported that a devastating overnight strike on a crowded neighborhood had killed dozens.<\/p>\n
The trip was the Israeli leader\u2019s second known visit to Gaza since the war began. He said that Israel would \u201cdeepen\u201d the fighting in coming days, even as he faces pressure from the United States to lower the intensity of the fighting. <\/p>\n
The strike late Sunday in central Gaza underscored the risk to civilians as fighting intensifies. Gazans were mourning the victims in the neighborhood, Al Maghazi, where many who have fled fighting in other parts of the enclave have sought shelter. <\/p>\n
Photos of the aftermath on Monday showed a gray concrete building gaping with dark holes where rooms used to be. At the foot of the building was a mound of debris, where men appeared to be digging for survivors, or bodies, without the aid of any heavy equipment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Gaza Health Ministry said 70 people had died in Sunday\u2019s attacks on <\/span>Al Maghazi But the ongoing difficulty of reaching residents in Gaza, where electricity shortages and communications blackouts have frequently obscured the picture of the war\u2019s fallout, meant the details were blurry.<\/p>\n As the Gazan death toll has soared and civilians have been pushed into smaller and smaller corners of the enclave, international calls for a cease-fire have grown. While Mr. Netanyahu\u2019s government has said it is planning for a new phase of the fighting,<\/a> the Israeli leader has repeatedly insisted that his military would keep up the war in Gaza until all of its goals were achieved.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not stopping, we are continuing to fight and are deepening the fighting in the coming days,\u201d he said in a statement released by his Likud Party on Monday, adding that \u201cthis will be a long battle and it is not close to ending.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Gazan Health Ministry officials blamed Israeli airstrikes for the deadly attack on the Al Maghazi neighborhood of central Gaza. Israel\u2019s military said Monday it was reviewing the episode.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Israeli forces are pushing deeper into central Gaza while also continuing to battle Hamas fighters in the enclave\u2019s north and south. Many places in central and southern Gaza are crowded with people who have fled their homes.<\/p>\n \u201cThese rockets, it\u2019s like they\u2019re made to destroy mountains, not people,\u201d said Mohamed Abu Shaah, who had taken shelter at an acquaintance\u2019s house in Al Maghazi with his wife and seven daughters. In Al Maghazi, he said, the influx of the newly displaced meant that 20 people were routinely crowding into a single room to sleep at night.<\/p>\n It was the fifth time his own family had packed up and rushed to a new place after fighting and airstrikes threatened the place they had taken shelter.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are doing everything we can just to run for our lives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The rising death toll in Gaza, which health ministry officials have said stands at about 20,000 people prompted Pope Francis on Monday to focus his Christmas address in part on the plight of Palestinians, as well as on Israeli hostages held in Gaza.<\/p>\n He mentioned Bethlehem, the holy city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where officials have largely canceled Christmas festivities in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and pleaded for peace to \u201ccome in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where war is devastating the lives of those peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The pope also called for \u201can end to the military operations with their appalling harvest of innocent civilian victims,\u201d and \u201cfor a solution to the desperate humanitarian situation by an opening to the provision of humanitarian aid.\u201d<\/p>\n Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.<\/p>\n Mr. Abu Shaah said he had just returned from prayer late Sunday night and was about to put his daughters to sleep in the bed that nine of them shared when they heard a loud thud. Afraid they would find themselves under the rubble, they ran downstairs to a scene of devastation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen a lot, but this is beyond anything we could have imagined,\u201d he said. \u201cToday my family and I are alive, but what about tomorrow?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Before the war, about 33,000 Palestinians lived in Al Maghazi, an area covering only about a quarter of a square mile, according to the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians. Most families in the neighborhood were originally from villages in the center and south of what was Palestine before they fled or were forcibly displaced in the 1948 war that surrounded Israel\u2019s establishment as a state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The neighborhood has been hit multiple times before, according to U.N. reports.<\/p>\n Save the Children, an aid group, called the strike on Al Maghazi \u201canother episode of the ongoing horror\u201d in Gaza.<\/p>\n \u201cFamilies and children are not targets and must be protected,\u201d it said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. \u201cWe need an immediate and definitive cease-fire to end this misery.\u201d<\/p>\n Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Rome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n