COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS DOWN, AID TO GAZA ON HOLD

Communications systems in the Gaza Strip were down for a second day Friday with no fuel to power the internet and phone networks, causing aid agencies to halt cross-border deliveries of humanitarian supplies even as they warned people may soon face starvation.

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Israel has been pushing deeper into Gaza City, and its troops have been searching Gaza’s biggest hospital, Shifa, for traces of a Hamas command center the military alleges was located under the building.

They have displayed images of what they said were a tunnel entrance and weapons found in a truck inside the compound but not yet any evidence of the command center, which Hamas and Shifa staff deny existed. The war, now in its sixth week, was triggered by Hamas’ 7 Oct attack in southern Israel, in which the militants killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured some 240 men, women and children.

Gaza is now receiving only 10% of its needed food supplies daily, and dehydration and malnutrition are growing with nearly all of the 2.3 million people in the territory needing food, said Abeer Etefa, a Mideast regional spokeswoman for the United Nations’ World Food Program. With few trucks entering Gaza and no fuel to distribute the food “there is no way to meet the current hunger needs,” she said on Thursday.