CAIRO (Dispatches) -- At least 103 Palestinians were martyred and more than 40 missing in an Israeli strike on a residential building in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya on Tuesday, the Gaza health ministry said.
“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the territory’s health ministry said in a statement.
Video footage showed several bodies wrapped in blankets on the ground outside a bombed four-storey building. More bodies and survivors were being retrieved from under the wreckage as neighbors rushed to help with rescue.
“There are tens of martyrs - tens of displaced people were living in this house. The house was bombed without prior warning. As you can see, martyrs are here and there, with body parts hanging on the walls,” Ismail Ouaida, a witness who was helping to recover bodies, said in the video.
On Monday, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said around 100,000 people were marooned in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun without medical or food supplies.
The health ministry said on Tuesday those wounded in the strike could not receive care as doctors had been forced to evacuate the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital.
“Critical cases without intervention will succumb to their destiny and die,” the ministry said in a statement.
Gaza’s emergency service said its operations had come to a halt because of the three-week Israeli onslaught on northern Gaza.  
The death toll from Israel’s air and ground invasion of Gaza since October 2023 has exceeded 43,000, the Gaza health ministry said.
Israeli raids on the Gaza Strip since dawn Tuesday had martyred at least 115 people, with 109 of the fatalities reported in northern Gaza, medical sources told Al Jazeera Arabic.
The Zionist regime says its onslaught aims to destroy Hamas, but the resistance group and other Palestinian movements are valiantly fighting Israeli invaders across the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military on Tuesday reported that four soldiers, including an officer, were killed in Jabalia, located in the northern Gaza Strip.
Gaza’s war has kindled wider conflict in the Middle East, with Israel bombing Lebanon and sending forces into its south.
Tuesday’s strike came a day after
 Israel’s parliament passed a law to ban the UN relief agency UNRWA from operating inside the Palestinian territories, alarming the international community which fears it will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini described the move as “collective punishment”.
It was unclear yet how the decision will impact the lives of Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, where the United Nations said most of its 2.3 million people have become internally displaced since the war erupted over a year ago.
UN rights expert Francesca Albanese renewed proclamation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, asserting that the Zionist regime aims to “eradicate Palestinians” from their homeland.
Albanese, an independent expert on rights in the occupied Palestinian territories who has often faced strong criticism from Israel, stated in a new report that “the genocide of the Palestinians appears to be the means to an end: the complete removal or eradication of Palestinians from the land integral to their identity, and which is illegally and openly coveted by Israel.”
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Riyad Mansour, said the international community has not been able to “scratch the surface of ending Israeli impunity” as the entire population of northern Gaza is at risk of death due to the nearly month-long Israeli siege. 
“I sat in this Security Council week after week, stood before the General Assembly week after week, hoping to be able to tell my people that help is on the way. They endured horrors that you watch on your TV screens and yet can barely comprehend, but their tormentors continue to be shielded, and Palestinian victims continue to be abandoned,” Mansour told a meeting of the UN Security Council to debate the crises in the region on Tuesday.
“As we barely scratch the surface of ending Israeli impunity, Israel continues committing crime after crime, defying every rule and all States assembled in these United Nations, betting that its will to kill and colonize will outweigh the collective will of the international community to save lives and achieve freedom and peace.”