At least 46 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza, as international mediators continued talks aimed at securing a truce and captives-for-prisoners exchange.
Medical sources provided Al Jazeera with Wednesday’s death toll in Gaza as Israeli forces also conducted several raids across the occupied West Bank, killing three people.
At least 45,936 people have been killed in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials, with another 109,274 wounded since Israel began its war in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas fighters on southern Israel. That attack killed at least 1,139 people, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli statistics, and around 250 others were taken captive.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said the majority of Israeli attacks on Wednesday were concentrated in the north of the Gaza Strip, particularly around Gaza City.
An Israeli strike on a Gaza City park killed five people and an attack on a school sheltering displaced people in Jabalia killed four, he said. In central Gaza, at least 10 people were killed in a strike on a family home in the Bureij refugee camp, including women and children, survivors said.
“There has been an intensification of air strikes since the early hours of this morning,” Abu Azzoum said, adding that Israeli attacks also injured four telecommunications employees who were working in maintaining internet landlines in Gaza City.
“What we saw in the past few hours is very devastating situation, especially in Gaza City, which has been the epicentre of military attacks, especially in densely populated areas,” he said.
Hospitals out of service
Rawya Taboura, a nurse at the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera the health facility is subject to direct Israeli shelling “targeting the hospital walls and its surroundings” and preventing aid deliveries.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said earlier this week that all three major hospitals in Gaza’s north remain out of service due to the fighting, with the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, Abu Safia, remaining detained by Israeli forces.
“Unfortunately, so far, no one has been able to provide aid due to the difficulty of the situation outside the hospital and the difficulty of coordinating with the relevant parties,” Taboura said.
“We have not been able to provide aid to the hospital,” she added. “The situation in the hospital is very dire.”
Further south, Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis announced it would shut down operations at 5pm (15:00 GMT) on Wednesday due to a lack of fuel, with the Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir el-Balah reporting it was out of basic medicine and supplies.
On Wednesday, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was among the international aid groups calling for unhindered access to Gaza. Aid groups have repeatedly accused Israel of stifling aid access.
The IFRC said that dire winter weather conditions were “exacerbating the unbearable conditions” in Gaza, with many families left “clinging on to survival in makeshift camps, without even the most basic necessities, such as blankets”.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), meanwhile, reported that at least 74 children had been killed in Gaza in the first week of 2025, “suffering from attacks, deprivation, and increasing exposure to the cold”.
The figure included eight infants and newborns who have died from hypothermia in recent days.
More than a million children are among Gaza’s displaced, with many living in makeshift tents with little protection from the elements, the agency said.
‘Heinous crimes’
As the fighting rages in Gaza, Israeli raids have continued across the occupied West Bank.
On Wednesday, the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) said 45 Palestinians have been arrested since Tuesday night across the governorates of Hebron, Nablus, Tubas, Tulkarem, Ramallah, and Jerusalem.
In Bethlehem, several teachers and students suffered injuries after inhaling tear gas that Israeli soldiers launched at the Kisan School east of Bethlehem, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
The tear gas was reportedly a response to some students throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles.
Meanwhile, three Palestinians, including two children, were killed by an Israeli air strike on the town of Tammun on Wednesday in Tubas governorate.
The killed children were identified as nine-year-old Rida Bisharat and 10-year-old Hamza Bisharat by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry. It described the strike as a “heinous crime”.
The ministry further said Israel’s “application of its aggressive policies in the West Bank” was “in flagrant violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions”.
Ceasefire talks continuing
As the fighting continued, mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and the United States were pushing forward with efforts to broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas that would see a ceasefire and exchange of Israeli captives held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Speaking from Paris, France on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintained that an agreement was “very close”.
However, past efforts to secure a trace have repeatedly failed, with both Hamas and Israel accusing each other of changing the terms.
Washington has also been criticised for not imposing more leverage on its “ironclad” ally Israel, to which it provides billions of dollars in military aid.
Meanwhile, US President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy appointee, Steve Witkoff, on Tuesday said he would travel to Doha, Qatar to join the negotiations. He expressed hope that an agreement would be reached before Trump takes office on January 20.
For his part, speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Trump told reporters that “all hell will break out” if a deal is not reached by the time he takes office. He declined to define what that means, or if it could spell increased US involvement in the conflict.
Later on Wednesday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said the bodies of two captives, Youssef and Hamza Ziyadne, had been recovered in Gaza.
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