Aid agencies are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as doctors warn an Israeli blockade on fuel means many more vulnerable babies and wounded people in hospitals will soon die.
One agency says at least 2000 children in Gaza have been killed in the past few weeks.
Israel has intensified its bombing campaign in the besieged strip after its defence minister Yoav Gallant said the country is preparing for a "multilateral operation" on the militant group Hamas that controls Gaza from the "air, ground, and sea".
Israel's leadership has vowed to wipe out Hamas in response to its October 7 deadly terror attacks and kidnap rampage in which 1400 people, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 200 taken hostage.
Today, Hamas freed two Israeli citizens – both elderly women – amid growing international pressure to secure the release of the rest of those abducted and taken to Gaza.
Inside Gaza, cut off from the world by a near-total blockade, Israeli airstrikes have decimated entire neighbourhoods, levelling homes, schools and mosques.
CNN drone footage showed the level of destruction across parts of the strip, with whole streets flattened in the al-Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza City and a row of destroyed buildings known as al-Zahra towers in central Gaza.
Hospitals will be 'mass graves' as Gaza crisis worsens: doctor
Save the Children said that over 1 million children are "trapped" in Gaza with no safe place to go and warned of the devastating impacts of lacking medication and electricity to power vital health infrastructure in the enclave.
"At least 2000 children have been killed in Gaza over the past 17 days, and a further 27 killed in the West Bank," the aid agency said.
"We call on all parties to take immediate steps to protect the lives of children, and on the international community to support those efforts," Save the Children said, adding that Israeli airstrikes are "killing and injuring children indiscriminately".
Latest figures from the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said the death toll resulting from Israeli strikes on the strip has reached at least 5087, including 2055 children.
"The health system has reached the worst stage in its history," said health ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qudra in a statement.
Fuel is a lifeline
Fuel means life in Gaza. Without fuel, water cannot be pumped or desalinated, and generators that power hospitals – that keep incubators, ventilators and dialysis machines running and sterilise surgical equipment – will fail.
Twelve hospitals and 32 medical centres are now out of service after Israeli strikes and fuel depletion, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
This evening, the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza had no electricity due to the fuel shortage, Hamas said.
Despite the urgency, no fuel trucks have entered Gaza as part of a humanitarian aid convoy from Egypt's Rafah border crossing over the weekend, according to Israeli and UN authorities.
Israel has repeatedly said fuel would be purloined by Hamas for its own war effort, including rocket attacks.
On Monday, Mark Regev, senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told CNN that Israel would not allow fuel into Gaza even if all hostages were released.
"At the moment we have no interest in more fuel going to the Hamas military machine and we have not authorised fuel," Regev said.
"We have authorised medicine, we have authorised water. We've authorised foodstuffs, we've not authorised anything else.
"The government decision is that fuel doesn't go in because it will be stolen by Hamas and it'll be used by them to power rockets that are fired into Israel to kill our people."
However, US State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that while the UN is "watching closely" for signs that Hamas is diverting humanitarian aid meant for civilians in Gaza, they have not reported any such signs to date.
Hospitals could become 'mass graves'
In Gaza, outbreaks of smallpox, scabies, and diarrhoea have emerged due to the deteriorating health environment, lack of sanitation, and consumption of water from unsafe sources, according to the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health based in the occupied West Bank.
Hospitals are nearing collapse, operating at more than 150 per cent of their capacity and situations have become so dire that surgeries are being conducted without anaesthesia, and in some cases, under the illumination of phone lights, the health ministry added.
Around 50,000 pregnant women are struggling to access health care, with about 166 unsafe births happening daily, and more than 5000 women due to give birth in the next month, it said.
The Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City – the largest hospital in the enclave – has enough fuel to last a maximum of two days, according to senior surgeon Marwan Abusada.
Conditions in Al-Shifa are dire, with another doctor saying that without electricity, the hospital "will just be a mass grave" and "there's nothing to do for these wounded".
British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah told CNN the "system is disintegrating" and without a ceasefire and a proper humanitarian corridor, "there's going to be an even larger catastrophe than the one that already exists here".
The overwhelmed hospital has run out of burns dressings for the more than 100 patients in the facility with burns covering over 40 per cent of their bodies, Abu-Sittah said.
More than 150 patients on ventilators with critical injuries are relying on electricity to stay alive, he said.
Hospitals across Gaza are facing similar situations.
A neonatal doctor working in a hospital in southern Gaza told CNN that premature babies relying on oxygen supplies will die if fuel is not urgently delivered into the enclave.
Hatem Edhair, head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Nasser Medical Complex, said all non-emergency facilities have been turned off, as well as lights and air conditioning.
He said 11 babies – most weighing under 1.5 kilograms – are in his ICU, with admission rates rising as residents from northern Gaza flee south.
Twenty more trucks carrying vital relief aid crossed into Gaza today, but aid agencies warn that the current rate of delivery will do little to address the needs of more than 2 million people living in the enclave.
The territory normally receives 455 aid trucks per day, according to the United Nations. That means that with the weekend deliveries, Gaza is more than 7200 truckloads of aid short of what would normally have been received between October 7 and October 22, CNN calculations suggest.
That's half of 1 per cent – or one two-hundredth – of the amount of aid it ordinarily receives.
