Israeli tanks advanced deep into a town in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday after days of relentless bombardment that forced tens of thousands of already displaced Palestinian families to flee in a new exodus.

A Palestinian journalist posted pictures of Israeli tanks near a mosque in a built-up area of Bureij which had apparently advanced from orchards on the eastern outskirts.

Further south, Israeli forces struck the area around a hospital in the heart of Khan Younis, the Gaza Strip’s main southern city, where residents feared a new ground push into territory crowded with families made homeless in 12 weeks of war.

Palestinian health authorities said 210 people were confirmed killed in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, raising the toll of the war to 21,320 dead — nearly 1 per cent of the enclave’s population. Thousands more dead are feared to be buried or lost in the ruins.

Israel has escalated its ground war in Gaza sharply since just before Christmas despite public pleas from its closest ally the United States to scale the campaign down in the closing weeks of the year.

It launched the war to destroy the Hamas movement that runs Gaza after fighters rampaged through Israeli towns on October 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing 240 hostages.

The main focus of fighting is now in central areas south of the wetlands that bisect the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have ordered civilians out over the past several days as their tanks advance.

Tens of thousands of people fleeing the huge Nusseirat, Bureij and Maghazi districts were heading south or west on Thursday into the already overwhelmed city of Deir al-Balah along the Mediterranean coast, crowding into hastily built camps of makeshift tents.

“Over 150,000 people - young children, women carrying babies, people with disabilities & the elderly - have nowhere to go,” the main UN organisation operating in Gaza, UNRWA, said in a social media post.

The eastern part of Bureij was a theatre of heavy fighting on Thursday morning, with Israeli tanks pushing in from the north and east, residents and militants said.

“That moment has come, I wished it would never happen, but it seems displacement is a must,” said Omar, 60, who said he had been forced to move with at least 35 family members.

“We are now in a tent in Deir al-Balah because of this brutal Israeli war,” he told Reuters by phone, declining to give a second name for fear of reprisals. Yamen Hamad, living in a school in Deir al-Balah since fleeing from the north, said the newly displaced from Bureij and Nusseirat were setting up tents wherever there was open ground.