UNDEFINED – Heavy urban fighting raged on Monday in the bloodiest war ever in the Gaza Strip. More than 18,200 Palestinians and 104 Israeli soldiers have been reported dead in a worsening humanitarian crisis.

The war was sparked by Hamas attacks on October 7 that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel and dragged dozens of hostages back to Gaza.

She warned that if Israel did not meet its demands and release more Palestinian prisoners, the remaining 137 hostages would not survive.

Brutal fighting continued in Gaza. Islamic Jihad militants said they blew up a house in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis where Israeli soldiers were searching for a tunnel shaft.

Rockets fired from Gaza hit Holon on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, wounding a civilian and leaving a crater in a residential street.

Live images from AFPTV showed a volcano-like cloud of gray smoke rising after an explosion in central Gaza, while AFP correspondents reported blasts shaking several urban areas.

Israel had urged civilians to seek refuge in the far south, but the army continued to attack targets throughout the area.

Umm Mohammed al-Jabri lost seven children in an airstrike on Rafah, near Egypt, after she fled there from Gaza City.

“I have four more children,” said Jabri, 56. “Last night they bombed the house we were in and destroyed it. They said Rafah was a safe place. There is no safe place.”

The Hamas-run health ministry’s latest death toll was 18,205, mostly women and children.

“PHYSICAL, SEXUAL ABUSE”

At an Israeli psychiatric hospital, doctors treating former hostages said many of them had been drugged by Hamas to keep them compliant in captivity and had suffered psychological and sexual abuse.

One was told his wife was dead while she was still alive in Israel, and others were held in complete darkness for more than four days, said Renana Eitan, director of the psychiatric department at Sourasky Medical Center-Ichilov in Tel Aviv.

“The physical, sexual, mental and psychological abuse of these returned hostages is simply terrible,” she told AFP. “We have to rewrite the textbook.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on Hamas to “surrender now.” His government claimed thousands of militants had been killed during the war, now in its third month.

The army said 500 militants were arrested last month.

Large parts of the Gaza Strip have been reduced to rubble by the offensive, and the UN estimates that 1.9 million of the 2.4 million people have been displaced. About half of them are children.

Amid growing pressure over humanitarian conditions, Israel announced it would review aid to Gaza at two additional checkpoints to bring more aid to the devastated strip.

EU top diplomat Josep Borrell said in a speech that the “apocalyptic” destruction was proportionally “even greater” than that suffered by Germany in World War II.

According to the UN aid agency OCHA, health services have been destroyed and only 14 of the 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip are fully functioning.

Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah was flooded with victims, including dozens of screaming children, on Monday after Israeli attacks on the nearby Al-Maghazi refugee camp.

Elsewhere, women and girls spoke of using scraps of cloth for menstruation as basic supplies dwindled and sanitary conditions deteriorated.

“I cut up my child’s clothes or any piece of fabric I find,” said Hala Ataya, 25, in Rafah.

Unable to get gas or firewood for cooking, Gazans took decades-old brass stoves to a workshop for repairs.

“People have returned to the old days,” said owner Ibrahim Shouman.

In Al-Rimal, thousands of Palestinians camped at the headquarters of a UN agency after surrounding homes and businesses were destroyed by Israeli attacks.

An AFP correspondent said both the Islamic and adjacent Al-Azhar universities, as well as the police station, had been reduced to rubble.

“There is no water. There is no electricity, no bread, no milk for the children and no diapers,” said Rami al-Dahduh, 23, a tailor.

UN-MEETING

The U.N. General Assembly will meet on Tuesday to discuss the humanitarian crisis after the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire last week.

A group of Security Council ambassadors traveled to Egypt to meet victims in the Gaza Strip as part of an informal tour.

“I just met a young mother who lost a child and has another little girl who is wounded,” Ecuador’s envoy Jose de la Gasca told AFP. “I never want to see what I just saw again.”

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Lebanon, a general strike in solidarity with Gaza led to the closure of shops, schools and government offices.

Elsewhere in the region, the war has emboldened Iranian-backed groups to attack U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Syria. Attacks were reported again on Monday.

An Israeli bombing raid killed an official in southern Lebanon, the National News Agency said, amid almost daily cross-border talks between Israel and Hezbollah.

Israeli strikes late Sunday near Damascus killed four people linked to Hezbollah, a Britain-based war monitor said.