HUNDREDS more Palestinians were killed today as Israel intensified its air and ground invasion of Gaza.

Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll at 195 in the past 24 hours, following a figure of 241 killed in the previous 24. Over 21,100 Palestinians have now been killed since Israel began its assault.

The Israeli attacks took place in areas where Palestinians had been told to seek shelter earlier in the war.

Palestinians reported heavy bombing in the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, in the southern city of Khan Younis — where 20 were reported dead from an air raid near the el-Amal hospital — and in the southern town of Rafah, areas where tens of thousands have sought refuge as much of northern Gaza was pounded to rubble.

Speaking from the Bureij refugee camp, where he has been sheltering since fleeing from northern Gaza, Rami Abu Mosab said: “It was a night of hell. We haven’t seen such bombing since the start of the war.”

He said warplanes flew overhead and gunfire and explosions echoed from the eastern edge of the camp, which, like others in Gaza, houses refugees from the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel.

Israel’s military chief of staff Herzi Halevi said today that the war would continue for months.

Its army’s latest evacuation orders cover an area of central Gaza that was home to nearly 90,000 people before the war and now shelters more than 61,000 displaced people, mostly from the north, according to the UN humanitarian office.

War on Want director Asad Rehman said: “It’s not that the international community is powerless to stop Israel’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people — our politicians [and] media are complicit and unwilling to stop it.”

“Israel’s bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip has killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced almost 80 per cent of the population. Yet our government remains complicit,” the Palestine Solidarity Campaign charged.

It called for a massive turnout in London as part of the global day of action on January 13. 

“We can’t stop putting pressure on our government to call for a full ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza.”

Campaigner Sarah Wilkinson told the Morning Star: “For decades, the Israeli regime always over-used the pretext of security and safety.

“Now after its genocide there will never be such a thing as security again. They have made themselves the enemies of the world.”

And veteran Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington John McDonnell said it was “time to demand our political leaders support a reference of these murders to the International Criminal Court.”

International condemnation rose too, with Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel condemning the “genocide committed by the terrorist state of Israel in Gaza” as “a humiliation for all humanity.” US feminist peace campaigners Codepink called on Washington to stop funding Israel’s war.

Israel has said the bombing campaign and ground offensive are necessary to dismantle Hamas and prevent a repeat of its October 7 attack, in which the organisation killed about 1,200 Israelis, mainly civilians, and took around 240 hostage.

The Israeli offensive is already one of the deadliest military campaigns in recent history. 

Nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian dead are women and children. 

Some 85 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes. 

UN officials say a quarter of the territory’s population is starving under Israel’s siege, which allows in a trickle of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies. 

Last week, the UN security council called for accelerated aid deliveries, but fell short of calling for an immediate ceasefire after the US insisted on heavily editing a draft resolution.

The war has ignited other fronts across the region.

Israel has repeatedly traded fire with Lebanese militia Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon. 

An Israeli strike on a family home overnight killed a Hezbollah fighter, his brother and his sister-in-law, local officials and state media said today, while Israel also claimed to have shot down three Lebanese aircraft which entered its airspace, providing no details.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed at least six Palestinians during an overnight raid in the built-up refugee camp of Nur Shams, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. In occupied East Jerusalem one man was arrested after settlers hung a decapitated donkey’s head in a Palestinian graveyard.

More than 300 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the start of the war, mostly in confrontations with Israeli forces during raids and protests.

As fears of a wider conflict mount, the US, Qatar and Egypt have reportedly been working on a new agreement on exchanging hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails.

Hamas has made it clear that there will be no more hostage releases until Israel ends the war, and that it will only trade the remaining captives for large numbers of Palestinian prisoners, including high-profile resistance fighters. Israel has rejected both demands.

Egypt has floated a proposal to end the war that would include the release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, as well as the establishment of a government of Palestinian technocrats to administer Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

But it received a cool reception from both sides.