By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Emily Rose
GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israeli forces carried out their biggest Gaza ground attack overnight in their 20-day-old war with Hamas as anger grew in the Arab world over Israel's relentless bombardment of the besieged Palestinian territory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had said Israeli troops were still preparing for a full ground invasion, while the U.S. and other countries urged Israel to delay, fearing it could ignite hostilities on other Middle East fronts.
The U.N. agency providing aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza said it may soon have to shut down operations if no fuel reaches the Hamas-ruled territory amid a desperate need for shelter, water, food and medical services.
Israel has bombarded the densely populated Gaza Strip following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli communities. Israel says Hamas killed some 1,400 people including children, and took more than 200 hostages, some of them infants and older adults.
Gaza's health ministry said on Thursday that 7,028 Palestinians had been killed in the retaliatory air strikes, including 2,913 children.
The U.S. State Department said Washington knows that a significant number of people have died in Gaza but does not have independent confirmation of numbers, and it does not trust figures released by Hamas.
The Israeli military has also said Hamas figures cannot be trusted, but has not provided its own assessment. Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra rejected statements questioning the figures.
The ministry on Thursday published a document which it said contains the names of all the victims who have been identified and their ID numbers.
Israeli army radio said the military had overnight staged its biggest incursion into northern Gaza of the current war. Armoured vehicles crossed the fortified border and blew up buildings, a military video showed.
"Tanks and infantry struck numerous terrorist cells, infrastructure and anti-tank missile launch posts," it said.
Palestinians said Israeli air strikes pounded the territory again overnight and people in central Gaza reported intensive tank shelling all night.
ARAB CRITICISM
With no sign of a let-up in Gaza, the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates condemned what they called the targeting of civilians and violations of international law.
Their joint statement said Israel's right to self-defence did not justify breaking the law and neglecting Palestinians' rights. The Arab ministers condemned forced displacement and collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza.
They also criticised Israel's occupation of Palestinian areas and called for more efforts to implement a two-state solution to the decades-long conflict - an idea at the heart of long-moribund peacemaking.
"The absence of a political solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has led to repeated acts of violence and suffering for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and the peoples of the region," it said.
Support for Israel came from European governments.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Friday will send a clear signal of backing for Israel.
"We can be certain that the Israeli army will respect the rules that arise from international law in everything it does," Scholz said.
But reflecting divisions within the bloc, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo warned Israel against starving Gaza.
Israel had a right to take action and to prevent future attacks, he said.
"But that is never an excuse for blocking a whole region, for blocking humanitarian aid. It cannot be an excuse to starve a population."
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Bloomberg that Washington was looking for more ways to reduce the flow of financing to Hamas.
HOSTAGES
Concern also grew over the fate of more than 200 hostages seized by Hamas in the Oct. 7 assault and taken to Gaza.
A spokesman for Hamas's armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said on Thursday about 50 captives had been killed in Gaza due to Israeli strikes. He gave no further details and Reuters was unable to verify the numbers.
Israel says there are 224 hostages, whose presence complicates any Israeli ground invasion. This includes a number of foreign passport holders. Hamas has freed four captives since Friday.
A Qatari negotiator told Sky News that a pause in fighting could help get more hostages released in coming days.
Qatari Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Mohammed Al Khulaifi said: "It's a very, very difficult negotiation ... With the bombing continuing every day, our task becomes more difficult. But despite that we remain hopeful."
MORE DEATHS
In Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, an Israeli air strike hit a house, killing a mother, her three daughters and a baby boy, whose father held his body in hospital.
"Did he kill? Did he wound someone? Did he capture someone? They were innocent children inside their house," he said.
The director of the Nasser hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, Nahed Abu Taaema, said the bodies of 77 people killed in air strikes had been brought in overnight, most of them women and children, Hamas's Al-Aqsa radio station reported.
Around midday on Thursday, Nasser hospital officials said, Israel bombed an area not far from an UNRWA shelter for displaced people, killing at least 18 people.
Israel said its forces had struck a Hamas missile launch post in the Khan Younis area that was next to a mosque and kindergarten. It was unclear whether the two sides were referring to the same incident.
Many Palestinians are sheltering in Khan Younis hospitals, schools, homes and refugee camps and on the street after Israel warned them to leave their homes in the north.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it urgently needed fuel to maintain life-saving humanitarian operations in Gaza. Israel has refused to let in fuel with aid shipments, saying it could be seized by Hamas.
The Israeli military says Hamas is holding large reserves of fuel for its own operations and for tunnel ventilation which could be used by hospitals.
More than 613,000 people made homeless by the war are sheltering in 150 UNRWA facilities across the shattered territory.
Humanitarian supplies are critically low but world powers failed at the United Nations to agree on how to call for a lull to the fighting to deliver significant amounts of aid.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, speaking at the U.N., said that if Israel's offensive against Hamas did not stop, the United States will "not be spared from this fire".
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Tala Ramadan, Henrietta Chacar, Emily Rose, Jeff Mason, Phil Stewart and Michelle Nichols; Writing by Philippa Fletcher, Angus MacSwan and Giles Elgood; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Howard Goller)
