GAZA CITY (Dispatches) – 
Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli forces killed dozens of people across the Palestinian territory on Wednesday, as the military pressed its assault on Gaza City from where hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee.
Israel has launched a major air and ground invasion of Gaza City. The United Nations estimated at the end of August that around one million people lived in Gaza City and its surroundings, where it has declared a famine.
The Israeli military says roughly 550,000 people have since fled the city and moved southward, while Gaza’s civil defense agency -- a rescue force operating under Hamas authority -- puts the number at around 450,000.
Thaer Saqr, 39, told AFP on Wednesday he had left the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City the day before to head southwards with his wife, children and sister.
“The tanks on the coastal road... opened fire on us, and my sister was killed,” he said.
Saqr said he returned to Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital and “will not leave, even if they kill us all.”
“I appeal to the world: help us. I say to Israel: you want us to evacuate, but how can we when we have no shekels, no transportation, and no place?”
The civil defense agency said that “hundreds of families” had been sleeping on the ground for days after fleeing from northern Gaza, unable to secure temporary shelter.
The civil defense said Israeli forces killed 40 people in attacks across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, including 22 killed by three airstrikes on a warehouse sheltering displaced people near the Firas market in Gaza City.
The agency’s spokesman, Mahmud Bassal, said the dead included six women and nine children.
Footage following the attack showed a scene of devastation, with Palestinians combing through large piles of rubble and warped metal as two men carried away a body wrapped in tattered blankets.
In the aftermath, sobbing women knelt over their loved ones, hugging their lifeless bodies wrapped in white shrouds.
At least six bodies were laid out on the ground, including two the size of children.
Muhammad Hajjaj, who lost his relatives, told AFP that “heavy bombing” hit the building while people were asleep. “We came and found children and women torn apart. It was a pitiful sight.”
Israel launched its U.S.-backed ground invasion on Gaza City earlier in September in a bid to occupy the urban hub.
Mahmud al-Dreimly, 44, said he had gone with his family a day earlier to live in a tent in Gaza City’s Al-Rimal neighborhood.
Dreimly said he saw tanks in the Tel al-Hawa and Al-Sabra neighborhoods, as well as on the outskirts of Al-Rimal.
The launch of the ground onslaught came as a UN probe found Israel of committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.
 Over nearly two years, Israeli military operations have killed at least 65,419 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Gaza, figures the UN considers reliable.