Cairo/Gaza/Jerusalem (Reuters) – Israel announced its worst combat losses in more than a month on Wednesday after an ambush in the ruins of Gaza, and faced growing diplomatic isolation as civilian deaths mounted and a humanitarian catastrophe worsened in the Palestinian territory.

Intense fighting between Hamas militants and Israeli soldiers was under way in both north and south Gaza, a day after the United Nations demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and U.S. President Joe Biden said Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of civilians was costing international support.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military would fight on despite international pressure for a ceasefire.

“We’re continuing until the end, until victory, until Hamas is annihilated,” he told soldiers in Gaza over radio. “I say this in the face of great pain but also in the face of international pressures. Nothing will stop us.”

Israel reported 10 of its soldiers killed in the past 24 hours, including a full colonel commanding a forward base and a lieutenant-colonel commanding a regiment. It was the worst one-day loss since 15 soldiers were killed on Oct. 31.

Most of the deaths came in the Shejaia district of Gaza City in the north, where troops were ambushed trying to rescue another group of soldiers who had attacked Hamas fighters in a building, the military said.

Hamas said the episode showed that Israeli forces could never subdue Gaza: “The longer you stay there, the greater the bill of your deaths and losses will be, and you will emerge from it carrying the tail of disappointment and loss, God willing.”

In a televised address, Hamas Chief Ismail Haniyeh said any future arrangement in Gaza without Hamas was a “delusion”.

White House Delays Sale Of Rifles

Israel had global sympathy when it began a campaign to annihilate Hamas, the group whose fighters stormed across the border fence from Gaza on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and seizing 240 hostages.

But since then, Israel has besieged the Palestinian enclave and laid much of it to waste. Gaza’s health ministry said on Wednesday at least 18,608 people have been killed and 50,594 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza. Many thousands more are feared lost in the rubble or beyond the reach of ambulances.

At least 288 displaced people in shelters run by the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, the agency said in a post on X on Wednesday.

The Biden administration is delaying the sale of more than 20,000 U.S.-made rifles to Israel over concerns about increasing attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Warplanes again bombed the length of Gaza and aid officials said the arrival of winter rain worsened conditions for hundreds of thousands sleeping rough in makeshift tents. The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless.

In Rafah, in Gaza’s south, the bodies of a family killed in an air strike were laid out in the rain in bloodied white shrouds, including several small children. One, the size of a newborn, was wrapped in a pink blanket.

Gravestones Scattered

Ahmed Abu Reyash collected the bodies of his nieces, aged 5 and 7. As he walked through the street carrying one of the girls, a relative tugged at the shroud and shouted: “These are children! Children! Do they kill anyone other than children? No! These are innocents! They killed them with their dirty hands!”

At a tent camp in Rafah, Yasmin Mhani said she had woken up at night to find her youngest child, who is seven months old, soaking wet.

“This is the fifth place we have had to move to, fleeing from one place to another, with nothing but a t-shirt on,” she said, hanging wet clothes outside her tent.

Since a week-long truce collapsed at the start of December, Israeli forces have extended their ground campaign from the northern Gaza Strip into the south with the storming of the main southern city of Khan Younis.

Meanwhile, fighting has only intensified amid the rubble of the north, where Israel had previously said its military objectives had been largely met.

The scars of Israel’s ground assault could be seen in a cemetery in the Al-Faluja neighbourhood of Jabalia, northern Gaza. Tanks had churned up the ground, breaking and scattering gravestones and disinterring some corpses.

In the south, Israeli forces advanced in recent days to the centre of Khan Younis, and on Wednesday were using bulldozers to destroy a road near the home of the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Al-Sinwar, resident Abu Abdallah told Reuters.

In central Rafah in southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian health officials said 13 people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit two houses.

Hospitals in the north have largely stopped functioning. In the south, they have been overrun by dead and wounded, carried in by the dozen throughout the day and night.

“Doctors including myself are stepping over the bodies of children to treat children who will die,” Dr Chris Hook, a British physician with medical charity MSF at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, told Reuters.

Israel says it has been encouraging increased aid to Gaza through Egypt’s border, and is announcing daily four-hour pauses in operations near Rafah to help civilians reach it. The U.N. says cumbersome inspections and insecurity limit aid flows.

Designated Safe Zones ‘Not Safe’

At an Israeli military press briefing, spokesperson Keren Hajioff said the military was taking several measures to prevent civilian casualties.

She said such measures included encouraging civilians to “temporarily” move out of the line of fire, which now extends across most of Gaza. But a UNICEF spokesman told CBS News on Wednesday that Gaza’s so-called safe zones are “quite simply not safe”.

Earlier on Wednesday, an Israeli military statement said that since it designated a humanitarian zone for civilians in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 18, 116 rockets had been fired from there toward Israel, with 38 of those falling inside Gaza.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who is visiting the region, would discuss with the Israelis the need to be more precise with their strikes against Hamas targets.

Sullivan met with officials of Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and discussed “broader diplomatic efforts to maintain stability across the region and prevent the Israel-Hamas conflict from expanding,” a U.S. official said.

Jerusalem (Reuters) – Israeli citizens said on Wednesday the army should not back off its unrelenting offensive to crush Hamas, despite the U.N. General Assembly’s ceasefire call, the growing list of troop casualties and a spiralling Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

Israel’s military suffered one of the deadliest days in the two-month-old Gaza war on Tuesday, with a colonel among 10 soldiers killed, bringing the toll to 115 – almost double the number killed during clashes in the coastal enclave nine years ago.

And with much of the enclave laid to waste, conditions dire and more than 18,500 Palestinians killed in the Israeli army’s air and ground assault, U.S. President Joe Biden said the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gazan civilians was costing Israel international support.

Polls in recent weeks show overwhelming backing for the war despite the rising human costs. Six Israelis who spoke to Reuters on Wednesday said now was not the time back down, regardless of fading global sympathy reflected in Tuesday’s U.N resolution.

Hamas’ killing of about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7 revived something Israel previously felt when Arabs staged a surprise attack in 1973 – fears that its neighbours and enemies could do away with the Jewish nation all together, said political scientist Tamar Hermann.

“The sense of the people is that this is a threat to the very existence of Israel,” said Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducts regular opinion polls on the war. She said that people were prepared for more deaths of soldiers.

Speaking in Jerusalem, retiree Ben Zion Levinger said Israel’s enemies would view any slowdown in fighting Hamas as a sign of weakness.

“If we don’t take this fight to the end, then tomorrow morning we’ll have battles in the north and in the east and the south and maybe Iran. Therefore, we have no choice,” said Levinger, a former IT worker.

Although the cost was “terrible,” the goal of the military operation was the total destruction of Hamas infrastructure in Gaza, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee chair Yuli Edelstein said in an interview.

Hamas said the killing of soldiers on Tuesday showed Israel would never achieve its war goals in Gaza. “The longer you stay there, the greater the bill of your deaths and losses will be, and you will emerge from it carrying the tail of disappointment and loss, God willing.”

Collateral Demage’

After a week-long pause in hostilities in November, more than three-quarters of Israelis said the offensive should resume without adjustments that would reduce either Palestinian civilian casualties or international pressure, according to a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute.

Israeli media reporting of the war dwells less on the civilian cost in Gaza than international coverage does. Hermann said that while views on Palestinian casualties varied depending on Israelis’ political leanings, some people felt the deaths were an acceptable price to pay for future security.

“There is a sense of first revenge, mainly on the right, and on the left and the centre they see it as I would say secondary to the achievements of the war … it is being perceived as collateral damage.”

Only 10% of Israelis thought the army was using too much firepower, according to a Tel Aviv University poll conducted in late October among 609 respondents, with a 4.2% margin of error.

Jerusalem resident Adam Saville, who works at a non-profit academic institution, said Israel was doing what it could to avoid killing non-combatants.

“It’s awful. It’s awful that there are so many civilian casualties, he said. “But this is war, and that’s what happens in war.”

Hostages

Along with capturing or killing the Hamas commanders who planned the Oct. 7 rampage through Kibbutzim and a rave in Israel, a goal of Israel’s war is to bring back the hostages grabbed by the militants and taken to Gaza.

Israel says at least 19 of the 135 remaining hostages are dead, and two bodies were recovered this week. Around 100 of the hostages were released during a week-long truce in November.

Portraits of the hostages with the slogan “bring them home” are pasted on walls and bus stops and projected on public buildings across Israel.

Israelis have proven willing in the past to make concessions to free hostages or spare their troops’ lives, but Oct. 7, the deadliest single incident in Israel’s 75-year-old history, has hardened opinions.

Unsurprisingly given the unstable situation, polling shows Israelis are unsure what a long-term solution would look like. However, the Israel Democracy Institute survey says more than 40% of citizens think the country should pursue the creation of a separate Palestinian state after the war.

In a possible sense of the mood, almost 60% of Israelis, including 40% of Arab Israelis, cited destroying Hamas in any way possible as the most important goal of the war, according to the Tel Aviv University poll.

Around a third said bringing the hostages home was the main goal.

“Right now, we didn’t achieve neither the first nor the second,” said Hermann. “Most people are ready to continue until the point where at least one of the major aims is achieved.”