Current situation in Gaza

The Israeli military is retaliating for the Hamas attack with near-constant airstrikes, forcing 4,23,000 people to flee their homes, according to the UN.

Most have crowded into UN schools. Others have sought the shrinking number of safe neighbourhoods. Gaza is only 40 km (25 miles) long, wedged among Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

While Israel has insisted that it is giving advance notice of its strikes, it is employing a new tactic of levelling whole swaths of neighbourhoods, rather than just individual buildings.

Palestinians were in near-total darkness overnight after the only power station ran out of fuel and shut down. Hospitals' supplies of medicine and fuel for emergency generators are also expected to run out within days.

The morgue at Gaza's biggest hospital overflowed Thursday as bodies came in faster than relatives could claim them on the sixth day of Israel's heavy aerial bombardment.

With scores of Palestinians killed each day, medics in the besieged enclave said they have run out of places to put remains pulled from the latest strikes or recovered from the ruins of demolished buildings.

The morgue at Gaza City's Shifa hospital can only handle some 30 bodies at a time, and workers had to stack corpses three high outside the walk-in cooler and put dozens more, side by side, in the parking lot. Some were placed in a tent, and others were sprawled on the cement, under the sun.

Internet connectivity in Gaza City has been below 20 per cent since Tuesday, according to analyst Doug Madory of the network monitoring firm Kentik Inc., whose data shows outages began Saturday morning.

Madory said an internet provider in Gaza told him that Israeli air strikes had cut fibre optic cables. (AP)