Israeli troops press forward into Gaza City as more Palestinians flee and death toll passes 65,000

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into Gaza City on Wednesday as more people fled the devastated area, and strikes cut off phone and internet services, making it harder for Palestinians to summon ambulances during the military's new offensive.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian death toll in the Israel-Hamas war surpassed 65,000, local health officials said.

The Israeli military said air force and artillery units have struck the city more than 150 times in the last few days, ahead of ground troops moving in. The strikes toppled high-rise towers in areas with densely populated tent camps. Israel claims the towers were being used by Hamas to watch troops.

Regulators said the severed phone and internet services hindered the ability of Palestinians to call for help, coordinate evacuations or share details of the offensive that began Monday and aims to take full control of the city.

Overnight strikes killed at least 16 people, including women and children, hospital officials reported. The death count in Gaza climbed to 65,062, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government. Another 165,697 Palestinians have been wounded since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that triggered the war.

The ministry does not say how many of the dead were civilians or militants. Its figures are seen as a reliable estimate by the U.N. and many independent experts.

Israeli bombardment has destroyed vast areas of Gaza, displaced around 90% of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with experts saying Gaza City is experiencing famine.

Palestinians streamed out of the city — some by car, others on foot. Israel opened another corridor south of Gaza City for two days beginning Wednesday to allow more people to evacuate.

Israeli forces have carried out multiple large-scale raids into Gaza City over the course of the war, only to see militants regroup later. This time, Israel has pledged to take control of the entire city.

More than half of the Palestinians killed in overnight Israeli strikes were in Gaza City, including a child and his mother who died in the Shati refugee camp, according to officials from Shifa Hospital, which received the casualties.

In central Gaza, Al-Awda Hospital said an Israeli strike hit a house in the urban Nuseirat refugee camp, killing three, including a pregnant woman. Two parents and their child were also killed when a strike hit their tent in the Muwasi area west of the city of Khan Younis, said officials from Nasser Hospital, where the bodies were brought.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it took steps to mitigate harm to civilians and that it would continue to operate against “terrorist organizations” in Gaza.

The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel in the 2023 attack, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 others. Forty-eight hostages remain in Gaza, with fewer than half believed to be alive.

The Gaza Health Ministry said multiple Israeli strikes hit the Rantisi Hospital for children in Gaza City on Tuesday night. It posted pictures on Facebook showing the damaged roof, water tanks and rubble in a hospital hallway.

The ministry said the strikes forced half of some 80 patients to flee the facility. About 40 patients, including four children in intensive care and eight premature babies, remained in the hospital with 30 medical workers, the ministry said.

“This attack has once again shattered the illusion that hospitals or any place in Gaza are safe from Israel’s genocide," said Fikr Shalltoot, Gaza director for the aid group Medical Aid for Palestinians.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the strikes. In the past, it has accused Hamas of building military infrastructure inside civilian areas.

The military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Col. Avichay Adraee, wrote on social media that a new route opened for those heading south for two days starting at noon Wednesday.

Many Palestinians in the north were cut off from the outside world. The Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, based in the occupied West Bank, said Israeli strikes on the main network lines in northern Gaza had cut off internet and telephone services Wednesday morning. The Associated Press tried unsuccessfully to reach many people in Gaza City.

The Israeli military said it was reviewing the incident and that it does not deliberately target public communication networks.

An estimated 1 million Palestinians were living in the Gaza City region before warnings to evacuate began ahead of the offensive. The Israeli military estimates 350,000 people have left the city.

Hamas senior official Ghazi Hamad made his first public appearance Wednesday following the Israeli strike on the militant group in Qatar earlier this month.

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas' political bureau, appeared in a live interview broadcast by the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera and accused the United States of being a bad mediator and siding with Israel.

The Hamas negotiating team and consultants were reviewing a U.S. ceasefire proposal when "less than an hour into the meeting, we heard the explosions," Hamad said.

The strike killed five Hamas members and a local security official and infuriated Arab leaders.

Also Wednesday, Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement saying it condemned “in the strongest terms” Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza. The ministry wrote on X that the operation marked an “extension of the war of genocide” against the Palestinians.

A coalition of leading aid groups Wednesday urged the international community to take stronger measures to stop Israel's offensive on Gaza City. The action came a day after a commission of U.N. experts found Israel was committing genocide in the Palestinian enclave. Israel denies the allegation.

“What we are witnessing in Gaza is not only an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, but what the U.N. Commission of Inquiry has now concluded is a genocide,” read the statement from the aid groups. “States must use every available political, economic and legal tool at their disposal to intervene. Rhetoric and half measures are not enough. This moment demands decisive action."

The message was signed by leaders of over 20 aid organizations operating in Gaza, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, Anera and Save the Children.

Israel’s far-right finance minister said Gaza could be a “real estate bonanza” and that he is discussing with the Trump administration how to share the proceeds.

Bezalel Smotrich, speaking at an urban-renewal conference in Tel Aviv, said a “business plan” has been submitted to U.S. President Donald Trump.

“We paid a lot of money for this war, so we need to divide how we make a percentage on the land marketing later in Gaza,” he said.

“And now, no kidding, we’ve done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal. Now we need to build. It’s much cheaper.”

Smotrich, a key ally in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, wants to continue the war until Hamas is eradicated, relocate much of Gaza’s population to other countries through what they refer to as “voluntary emigration” and rebuild Jewish settlements that were dismantled in 2005.

Trump said in February he envisioned development in Gaza turning the region into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Magdy reported from Cairo.

Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Displaced Palestinians flee Gaza City by foot and vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians flee Gaza City by foot and vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians flee Gaza City by foot and vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians flee Gaza City by foot and vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians flee Gaza City by foot and vehicles, carrying their belongings along the coastal road toward southern Gaza, Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians walk through a makeshift tent camp along the shore of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Displaced Palestinians flee northern Gaza along the coastal road toward the south, as Israel announced an expanded operation in Gaza City, Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians flee northern Gaza along the coastal road toward the south, after Israel's military says its expanded operation in Gaza City has begun and warns residents to leave, Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Displaced Palestinians flee northern Gaza along the coastal road toward the south, as Israel announced an expanded operation in Gaza City, Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Myanmar insisted Friday that its deadly military campaign against the Rohingya ethnic minority was a legitimate counter-terrorism operation and did not amount to genocide, as it defended itself at the top United Nations court against an allegation of breaching the genocide convention.

Myanmar launched the campaign in Rakhine state in 2017 after an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group. Security forces were accused of mass rapes, killings and torching thousands of homes as more than 700,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh.

“Myanmar was not obliged to remain idle and allow terrorists to have free reign of northern Rakhine state,” the country’s representative Ko Ko Hlaing told black-robed judges at the International Court of Justice.

African nation Gambia brought a case at the court in 2019 alleging that Myanmar's military actions amount to a breach of the Genocide Convention that was drawn up in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.

Some 1.2 million members of the Rohingya minority are still languishing in chaotic, overcrowded camps in Bangladesh, where armed groups recruit children and girls as young as 12 are forced into prostitution. The sudden and severe foreign aid cuts imposed last year by U.S. President Donald Trump shuttered thousands of the camps’ schools and have caused children to starve to death.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has long considered the Rohingya Muslim minority to be “Bengalis” from Bangladesh even though their families have lived in the country for generations. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982.

As hearings opened Monday, Gambian Justice Minister Dawda Jallow said his nation filed the case after the Rohingya “endured decades of appalling persecution, and years of dehumanizing propaganda. This culminated in the savage, genocidal ‘clearance operations’ of 2016 and 2017, which were followed by continued genocidal policies meant to erase their existence in Myanmar.”

Hlaing disputed the evidence Gambia cited in its case, including the findings of an international fact-finding mission set up by the U.N.'s Human Rights Council.

“Myanmar’s position is that the Gambia has failed to meet its burden of proof," he said. "This case will be decided on the basis of proven facts, not unsubstantiated allegations. Emotional anguish and blurry factual pictures are not a substitute for rigorous presentation of facts.”

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi represented her country at jurisdiction hearings in the case in 2019, denying that Myanmar armed forces committed genocide and instead casting the mass exodus of Rohingya people from the country she led as an unfortunate result of a battle with insurgents.

The pro-democracy icon is now in prison after being convicted of what her supporters call trumped-up charges after a military takeover of power.

Myanmar contested the court’s jurisdiction, saying Gambia was not directly involved in the conflict and therefore could not initiate a case. Both countries are signatories to the genocide convention, and in 2022, judges rejected the argument, allowing the case to move forward.

Gambia rejects Myanmar's claims that it was combating terrorism, with Jallow telling judges on Monday that “genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from Myanmar’s pattern of conduct.”

In late 2024, prosecutors at another Hague-based tribunal, the International Criminal Court, requested an arrest warrant for the head of Myanmar’s military regime for crimes committed against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power from Suu Kyi in 2021, is accused of crimes against humanity for the persecution of the Rohingya. The request is still pending.

FILE - In this Sept. 7, 2017, file photo, smoke rises from a burned house in Gawdu Zara village, northern Rakhine state, where the vast majority of the country's 1.1 million Rohingya lived, Myanmar. (AP Photo, File)