DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (Dispatches) — A Palestinian medical charity said Tuesday that Israel destroyed its main center in Gaza City after ordering its evacuation.
Hospitals in Gaza said 26 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire since dawn Tuesday, with 18 of the dead reported in Gaza City alone. Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours had killed at least 38 Palestinians and wounded 190 more.
The Palestinian Medical Relief Society said an Israeli strike reduced its six-story building in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood to rubble. It said the center was one of the main facilities in the city providing blood donation and testing services, trauma care, cancer medicine and chronic disease treatment.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has repeatedly bombed and raided hospitals in Gaza throughout the war.
Multiple hospitals in the famine-stricken city have been forced to shut down as Israel forces advance. Israel accuses Hamas of using medical facilities for military purposes but the Zionist military has provided little or no evidence of an resistance presence.
The head of the World Health Organization, which has partnered with the charity, condemned the strike. “Attacks on health facilities must end. The senseless violence must stop. Ceasefire!” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X.
The medical charity said another of its centers was damaged and surrounded by Israeli troops, and that a third center was destroyed in a separate strike. Gaza’s Health Ministry said Monday that the Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital and the Specialized Eye Hospital had been forced to shut down because of nearby Israeli military operations.
Israel launched a major onslaught earlier this month aimed at occupying Gaza City, the territory’s largest, which has already suffered heavy damage from previous raids and bombardment.  
The world’s leading authority on hunger crises said last month that Israel’s blockade and ongoing invasion had already pushed Gaza City into famine. More than 300,000 people have fled the city in recent weeks as Israel has ordered the population to move south, but an estimated 700,000 remain, according to UN agencies and aid groups.
The Gaza Health Ministry says at least 65,382 Palestinians have been martyred in the war, without saying how many were civilians or combatants.  
The Zionist regime seeks to permanently occupy Gaza and wants to ensure a Jewish majority in the occupied West Bank, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said in a report on Tuesday.
Reuters quoted the report saying that the Israeli authorities have systematically demolished civilian infrastructure in Gaza, resulting in Israel expanding occupation to 75 percent of the enclave by July this year. 
“Israeli forces have also intentionally altered the geography of Gaza” through the creation of military corridors, the report said.