Scores of Palestinians were killed in central Gaza on Sunday after Israel stepped up its strikes on the war-torn enclave and another convoy of 17 aid trucks arrived as the Hamas-run territory faces "catastrophic" shortages.

With the violence raging unchecked, Iran said the region could spiral "out of control" and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a stark warning to Lebanon's Hezbollah, saying getting involved would be "the mistake of its life".

But Washington also fired a shot across the bows of any actors looking to inflame the conflict, saying it wouldn't hesitate to act in the event of any "escalation".

Hamas militants stormed across the border into Israel on October 7, launching a raid that killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians who were shot, mutilated or burnt to death on the first day, according to Israeli officials.

They also seized more than 200 hostages in the worst-ever attack in Israel's history.

Israel has hit back with a relentless bombing campaign which has so far killed more than 4,600 Palestinians, mainly civilians, according to Gaza's health ministry, with officials saying the central town of Deir al-Balah had been particularly badly hit overnight.

The ministry said at least 80 people had been killed in the overnight raids on central Gaza which had destroyed more than 30 homes.

At the hospital morgue, an AFP journalist saw the bodies of many children on the bloodied floor, where distraught families wept as they identified the victims.

Among them was a man clutching his dead toddler and a young boy who pulled back a blanket over his little sister's body.

"My cousin was sleeping in his house with his daughter in his arms. He was a man with no record, nothing to do with the resistance," said Wael Wafi, gazing at the body of his cousin, his arm still wrapped around his three-year-old daughter Misk.

Also Sunday, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that 29 of its staff had been killed since the start of the war in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, saying half of them were teachers. On Saturday it had given a toll of 17.

The scale of the bombing has left basic systems unable to function, with the UN saying dozens of unidentified bodies had been buried in a mass grave in Gaza City because cold storage had run out.

Meanwhile, an Israeli soldier was killed near the Gaza border by an anti-tank missile fired by militants inside the enclave, the army said.

– 'Accident' as Israel hits Egypt post –

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned the war with Hamas could take months.

"It will take one month, two months, three months, and at the end there will be no more Hamas," Gallant said.

A second convoy of 17 trucks of aid entered Gaza from Egypt on Sunday following an initial delivery of 20 trucks on Saturday after intensive negotiations and US pressure.

Separately, an AFP journalist saw six trucks leaving Rafah after filling up from dwindling fuel stocks held at the crossing as the enclave faces catastrophic shortages after Israel cut off supplies of food, water, fuel and electricity.

It later resumed water supplies to the south on October 15.

Although Egyptian media said another 40 trucks would enter Gaza on Monday, the UN says the enclave needs 100 trucks per day to meet the needs of Gaza's 2.4 million residents.

And so far, there have been no deliveries of fuel, with UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini warning Sunday that supplies would run out "in three days".

"Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and.. aid will not reach many civilians in desperate need," he said.

The Hamas government meanwhile said 165,000 housing units — half of those in the entire Gaza Strip — had been destroyed in the raids.

With fears growing that the conflict could spread, Israel on Sunday admitted accidentally hitting an Egyptian border post, apologising for the incident which Cairo said had left an unspecified number of border guards with "minor injuries".

– Risk of regional escalation –

Meanwhile, there were fresh exchanges of fire over Israel's northern border with Lebanon as fears grew that Hezbollah, a close ally of Hamas and Iran, could enter the conflict, prompting Israel's Netanyahu to warn it would be "the mistake of its life".

"We will strike it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the significance for it and the state of Lebanon will be devastating," he said.

Iran also warned about the conflict spreading on Sunday, with top diplomat Hossein Amir-Abdollahian cautioning that if Washington and Israel did not "immediately stop the crime against humanity and genocide in Gaza.. the region will go out of control".

But Washington said it wouldn't hesitate to act in the event of any "escalation", just hours after the Pentagon moved to step up military readiness in the region.

"If any group or any country is looking to widen this conflict and take advantage of this very unfortunate situation that we see, our advice is: don't," US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said on ABC News.

On Sunday, Pope Francis used his weekly Angelus prayer in Rome to plead for an end to the bloodshed.

"War is always a defeat, it is a destruction of human fraternity. Brothers, stop!" he said.

He later held a 20-minute conversation with US President Joe Biden about "conflict situations in the world and the need to identify paths to peace", the Vatican said.

Biden later discussed with war with the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy, the White House said.

Meanwhile, protesters hit the streets of several European capitals on Sunday with at least 10,000 people rallying in support of Israel in Berlin as Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to stamp out a resurgence of anti-Semitic incidents linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

And thousands rallied in Paris to demand an end to Israel's operation in Gaza in the first pro-Palestinian rally in the French capital that wasn't banned on security grounds.

'Rather be with them': Gaza students in Egypt fear worst for families
Cairo (AFP) Oct 20, 2023 –

The last time Saja Samy heard from her family in Gaza, they were sheltering, along with thousands of others, at a hospital compound under threat of Israeli air strikes.

In her dorm room in Egypt, the 20-year-old medical student clutches her phone, desperately scrolling for any clue as to whether her family is still alive.

On October 7, Hamas militants stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.

Under siege and battered by Israeli reprisal strikes that Palestinian officials say have killed more than 3,700 people, Gaza's 2.4 million people have since been deprived of electricity and, by extension, most contact with the outside world.

"I can't think straight. I don't know where my family is. I don't know if they're okay," she told AFP.

"Every time I talk to my mom, she tells me that she doesn't know if they'll survive this and how I have to take care of myself. But what am I supposed to do on my own?"

Like 6,000 other Palestinians studying in Egyptian universities, Samy has been forced to watch the war in Gaza from afar.

Dozens of them sat in an exam hall last week, willing themselves to focus on a test — and not their families suffering barely a five-hour drive away.

When her mother last spoke to her from Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, she said she was afraid that "if the air strikes don't kill them, the children will die of fright".

Samy doesn't sleep, thinking of her six-year-old sister lying awake on the ground in the hospital courtyard, shivering in the cold.

Every time she sees news of a bombed-out hospital, her heart stops.

– Panicked group chats –

Like Samy, 21-year-old Ghaidaa Jaber stares endlessly at her phone screen, begging for her messages to go through.

The last message from her mother on October 12 said she was leaving their home in northern Gaza to head south with Jaber's four sisters and three brothers in a desperate attempt to flee the relentless bombardment.

"I haven't heard anything since," she told AFP.

In panicked group chats, Jaber and other students try to triangulate information.

"We're trying to see on social media where they've bombed, what's nearby, what roads our families could be on, going through lists of martyrs and families that have been killed."

"All you can do is pray" and hope you don't come across your own surname, she said.

Haya Shehab, 21, learned from an Instagram post that her extended family's home had been bombed, killing 45 people — dozens of them cousins.

"Just like that, 45 of us gone," said Shehab, who studies at a private university in Cairo.

– 'This time is worse' –

Jaber was six when she first felt her home tremble under the force of Israeli air strikes, and remembers clutching onto her family for dear life as bombs rained down from above.

"I know what it's like, but this time is so much worse," she said.

The formative memory of Jaber, Samy, and countless others' childhoods was the war on Gaza in 2014, when Israeli forces killed around 2,250 Palestinians.

"That was 50 days. There were as many martyred now in the first week of the war," Jaber said.

For years, Samy's father insisted the family stay put despite the violence, reminding them "our home is all we have".

But on October 7, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared "a long and difficult war", the family packed up and left their home which within days was reduced to a smouldering pile of rubble.

"We always used to say they don't bomb western Gaza, but this war proved to me that nowhere is safe," Samy said.

Shehab also thought her family's home in the southern district of Khan Yunis was relatively safe, where "bombings were limited".

"But not this time."

Israel's assault has hit residential buildings, roads they had designated as safe escape routes and southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians have fled after Israel ordered them out of the north.

And for the terrified students who are unable to go about their lives, there is also the overwhelming sense of guilt.

"How dare I be so far away? How can I eat when they're hungry? How can I sleep?" wonders Jaber who has been locked in her room for two weeks.

Samy has also been blaming herself.

"I hate this feeling, knowing I'm safe and they're not. I wish I was with them, I would rather be with them and die with them than feel like this."