The Palestinian Red Cross said Israeli forces have been laying siege to their ambulance depot near the wrecked Gaza city of Jabalia.

"Intense artillery shelling persists in the vicinity of the center, accompanied by gunfire from Israeli snipers," the PRCS said in a statement translated by NBC News. "This poses a threat to the safety of 127 individuals, including paramedics, volunteers, and their families, among whom are 22 wounded individuals receiving treatment inside the center."

There was no immediate response from the Israeli side, but Jabalia is home to one of the biggest and most densely populated refugee camps in Gaza. In October, an Israeli airstrike on the camp killed dozens of Palestinian civilians and wounded scores more.

The Israelis said they killed senior Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari, who they said was an architect of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. 

Only 9 out of 36 medical facilities in Gaza are still partly functional in the whole of the Gaza strip, Richard Peeperkorn, head of the Gaza and West Bank branch of the WHO said today, adding that all of these hospitals were in the south, and not a single one remained functioning in the north of the strip.

“It’s a place that [...] looks more like a hospice now than a hospital, but a hospice implies a level of care that doctors and nurses are simply to unable to provide given the circumstances," said Sean Casey, a WHO Health Emergency Preparedness & Response worker, describing Al-Ahli hospital to NBC News.

“At the moment, it’s a place where people are waiting to die unless we are able to move them to a safer location,” he added, saying that workers had heard gunfire as they approached the hospital and reiterating calls for a humanitarian cease-fire.

“I’ve never seen suffering like this,” he said.

Once again the war in Gaza threatened to broaden into a regional conflict with the Israelis announcing their forces had struck Hezbollah "military targets" in southern Lebanon.

Israeli fighter planes attacked rocket launchers, military buildings, and military infrastructure belonging to the militant group that is supporting Hamas, IDF spokesperson Avichay Adreea said.

Also, Israeli artillery shelled other Hezbollah positions in Lebanon in retaliation for the militant group's aerial assaults on the northern Israeli settlements of Doviv and Avivim, Adreea said.

Meta has been systemically and globally suppressing voices in support of Palestinians on Instagram and Facebook, Human Rights Watch said in a report today. 

Over 1,050 takedowns and other suppressions of content posted by Palestinians and their supporters were recorded between October and November this year, said the report, Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook.  

The report said that 1,049 included peaceful expressions of support for Palestinians and some highlighted rights abuses. All of them were “censored or otherwise unduly suppressed,” it added. Only one case involved removal of content in support of Israel, it said. 

The report said content from over 60 countries had been reviewed and described the censorship as “the biggest wave of suppression of content about Palestine” so far.

Fifty-five people have been killed in raids on homes in Khan Younis over the past 24 hours, the Hamas-run Gaza information ministry said today.

Bombs fired from boats also caused dozens of deaths and injuries in Rafah, the update from the ministry said.

Earlier, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported shelling near Al-Amal hospital in the southern city Khan Younis, as well as injuries and casualties near the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

NBC News has been unable to independently verify these reports. But the Israeli military has previously acknowledged an intensification of its military activity in the south of the Gaza strip.

On his return to kibbutz Be’eri, Ofir Engel, 18, who was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, and later freed as part of a prisoner exchange with the militant group, called for the release of the hostages still captive in Gaza.

“They all have to come home now,” Engel told the crowd.

UNRWA, the U.N.'s Palestinian refugee agency, said that around 93% of the displaced people in southern Gaza have “inadequate food consumption.”

“People — & this is also something completely new — people are stopping aid trucks, taking the food & eating it right away,” the relief agency said on X today.

“People are desperate, hunger stalks everyone,” it said.

Hundreds of wounded are dying at hospitals in northern Gaza because of a lack of services, Palestinian Health Ministry spokesperson Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra said. 

In a statement on Telegram, Al-Qudra cited Al-Shifa specifically, saying that the absence of services at the complex was resulting in the death of the wounded. The World Health Organization described Al-Shifa as a 'bloodbath' last week, with hundreds of new patients arriving continually and only a handful of doctors, nurses and volunteers to treat them.

Video footage posted on social media of Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus showed a similar situation.

A WHO worker speaking from a church on the grounds of Al-Ahli said many patients had been waiting for operations for more than a month and that those who had been operated on were contracting post-operative infections because of a lack of antibiotics. Only five doctors and five nurses were available for care, he said. In the background of the video, the wounded lay on pews and on the church floor for lack of space in the hospital.

The death toll in Gaza has reached "about 20,000" people, the Palestinian Health Ministry has said in a statement, 70% of them women and children.

It's a grim milestone, but the figure itself is an estimate that is limited to those confirmed dead. The exact number remains unknown because of the volume of people missing under the rubble, and the lack of resources to comb through destroyed buildings. More than 55,000 people have been reported injured, the ministry said.