Palestinian residents of Gaza City have come under relentless Israeli bombardment as the military prepares for a major offensive to seize and ethnically cleanse the area, barring emergency workers from reaching people trapped in the residential Zeitoun neighbourhood.

Gaza civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army had been firing at emergency vehicles trying to reach the wounded in Zeitoun on Friday, as Israeli quadcopters dropped leaflets threatening a forced displacement. Residents were told to leave sections of the eastern neighbourhood, where hundreds of homes have recently been destroyed.

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Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said Israel had been deploying “heavy artillery, drones and fighter jets”, with four neighbourhoods of Gaza City “reporting relentless bombardment shaking the ground day and night” as the military advanced its plans.

It was, he said, “a full dismantling of civilian life to ensure that people will never be allowed back into this area”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing to seize Gaza’s largest urban hub and forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to concentration zones, despite a wave of criticism from families of captives held in Gaza and their supporters, the Israeli security establishment, and a multitude of nations and organisations around the world.

As the military closed in on Gaza City, it also continued attacks on other parts of the enclave, killing 44 people, including 16 aid seekers desperately seeking sustenance for their families, according to medical sources who spoke to Al Jazeera.

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Attacks included strikes on two hospitals, underscoring daily Palestinian pleas that no place in the besieged and bombarded enclave is safe. One person was killed at al-Shifa in Gaza City, which has been bombed and burned multiple times over the war. And at least two were killed at Deir el-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in an explosion preceded by a swarm of Israeli drones hovering over the hospital.

‘Human remains 46 days under the rubble’

Amid the reports of further Israeli killing, Al Jazeera Arabic reported that a woman in the devastated Tuffah neighbourhood east of Gaza City retrieved the body of her brother and some remains of her father from the rubble of a bombed house.

The woman said that the bodies had been trapped along with 31 others since an air strike that had taken place 46 days earlier – the timeline indicating the attack occurred at the end of June. With no equipment to retrieve them under Israel’s harshly punitive blockade, it had been impossible to find them.

“What we are facing is too much. Too much torture and oppression. Torture, tiredness, and pain,” she said.

Starvation and dehydration as temperatures soar

In parallel, aid seekers continued to be targeted near humanitarian distribution sites run by the GHF, with medical sources reporting 16 were killed on Friday.

The United Nations human rights office said at least 1,760 Palestinians had been killed while seeking aid in Gaza since late May – a jump of several hundred since its last published figures at the beginning of August.

Of the 1,760, 994 were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 766 along the routes of supply convoys. Most of the killings were committed by the Israeli military, the agency said in a statement. United States security contractors have also fired on aid seekers.

Meanwhile, as reports emerged that another child had died of Israeli-induced starvation in the enclave, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA)  said nearly one in five young children in Gaza City were now deemed to be malnourished.

The starvation death toll has now reached 240, including 107 children, according to the Health Ministry.

The UN has said Gaza requires the equivalent of at least 600 trucks of aid entering daily to fight off the effects of man-made starvation caused by months of total Israeli blockade.

The Israeli army entity in charge of managing aid – Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories – claimed that it allowed 310 aid trucks to enter Gaza on Thursday. It said that more than 290 were collected and distributed by the UN and other international organisations.

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International and Palestinian groups are reporting only one-sixth of the necessary 600 trucks a day are actually entering the territory where Israeli-backed gangs are engaged in looting.

As people battle extreme hunger, they are also enduring severe dehydration in the current heatwave, with record temperatures surpassing 40C (or 104F), and are resorting to drinking contaminated water.

“It causes stomach cramps for adults and children, without exception,” Hosni Shaheen, whose family was displaced from Khan Younis, told The Associated Press. “You don’t feel safe when your children drink it”.