Thousands of people broke into aid warehouses in Gaza to take flour and basic hygiene products, a UN agency said on Sunday, in a mark of growing desperation and the breakdown of public order three weeks into the war between Israel and Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.

Thomas White --- director, Gaza, for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA --- said the warehouse break-ins were “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza”.

He added: “People are scared, frustrated and desperate.”

The UNRWA provides basic services to hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. Its schools across the territory have been transformed into packed shelters housing Palestinians displaced by the conflict. Israel has allowed only a small trickle of aid to enter from Egypt, some of which was stored in one of the warehouses that was broken into, the UNRWA said.

Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the agency, said the crowds broke into four facilities on Saturday. She said the warehouses did not contain any fuel, which has been in critically short supply since Israel cut off all shipments after the start of the war.

Gaza’s health ministry said the death toll among Palestinians had passed 8,000. That included more than 3,300 minors and more than 2,000 women, the ministry said. It’s a toll without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, and one that is expected to climb even more rapidly as Israel presses with its ground offensive.

Tanks and infantry pushed into Gaza over the weekend as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a “second stage” in the war, three weeks after Hamas launched a brutal incursion into Israel. Netanyahu called it a war for Israel’s existence, and said “Never again is now.” The widening ground offensive came as Israel also pounded the territory from air, land and sea.

The bombardment — described by Gaza residents as the most intense of the war — knocked out most communications in the territory late on Friday, largely cutting off the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people from the world. Communications were restored to much of Gaza early on Sunday.

The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had struck over 450 militant targets in the past 24 hours, including Hamas command centres, observation posts and anti-tank missile launching positions. It said more ground forces had been sent into Gaza overnight.

Residents living near Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, said overnight Israeli airstrikes had hit near the hospital complex and blocked many roads leading to it. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital, without providing much evidence.

Tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering in Shifa, which is also packed with patients wounded in the strikes.

“Reaching the hospital has become increasingly difficult,” Mahmoud al-Sawah, who is sheltering in the hospital, said over the phone. “It seems they want to cut off the area.”

Another Gaza City resident, Abdallah Sayed, said the Israeli bombing over the past two days was “the most violent and intense” since the war started.

The Israeli army recently released computer-generated images showing what it said were Hamas installations in and around Shifa Hospital, as well as interrogations of captured Hamas fighters who may have been speaking under duress. Israel has made similar claims before but has not substantiated them.

Little is known about Hamas’s tunnels and other infrastructure, and the claims could not be independently verified. Hamas’s government denied the allegations and said they were aimed at justifying future strikes on the facility.

The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said another Gaza City hospital had received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday, ordering it to evacuate. It said airstrikes had hit as close as 50 metres from the Al-Quds Hospital, where 12,000 people are sheltering.

Israel had ordered the hospital to evacuate more than a week ago, but it and other medical facilities have refused, saying it would mean death for patients on ventilators.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on the latest evacuation order or the strikes near Shifa.

An Israeli airstrike hit a two-story house in the southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday, killing at least 13 people, including 10 from one family. The bodies were brought to the nearby Nasser Hospital, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.