Gaza's Shifa Hospital has become the focus of a dayslong stalemate in Israel's war against the Hamas militant group.

Shifa is Gaza's largest and best-equipped hospital. Israel, without providing visual evidence, claims the facility also is used by Hamas for military purposes. It says Hamas has built a vast underground command complex center below the hospital, connected by tunnels, something Gaza health officials and Hamas deny.

Another 200,000 people have fled northern Gaza since Nov. 5, the U.N. humanitarian office said Tuesday, as Israeli ground forces battle Palestinian militants around hospitals where patients, newborns and medics are stranded with no electricity and dwindling supplies.

The humanitarian office, known as OCHA, says only one hospital in the north is capable of receiving patients. All the others are no longer able to function and mostly serve as shelters from the fighting, including Gaza's largest, Shifa, which is surrounded by Israeli troops and where 36 babies are at risk of dying because there is no power for incubators.

The director of Gaza's biggest hospital said Tuesday that 179 people, including babies and patients who died in the intensive care unit, had been buried in a "mass grave" at the complex.

"We were forced to bury them in a mass grave," said Al-Shifa hospital director Mohammad Abu Salmiyah, adding that seven babies and 29 intensive care patients were among those buried after the hospital's fuel supplies ran out.

Battle cries pierce the smoke and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire as Ukrainian soldiers fight through and take enemy trenches and dugouts that hide gruesome, bloody remains.

"Grenade!" one screams in Ukrainian. Another yells: "Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go!"

The 27 European Union nations have jointly condemned Hamas for what they described as the use of hospitals and civilians as "human shields" in the war against Israel.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said Monday that at the same time the bloc asked Israel "for maximum restraint in targeting in order to avoid human casualties."

Former British Prime Minister David Cameron made a shock return to high office on Monday, becoming foreign secretary in a major shakeup of the Conservative government that also saw the firing of divisive Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

Cameron, who led the U.K. government between 2010 and 2016, was appointed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in a Cabinet shuffle in which he sacked Braverman, a divisive figure who drew anger for accusing police of being too lenient with pro-Palestinian protesters.

At least eight pro-Iran fighters were killed in U.S. strikes on eastern Syria, a war monitor said Monday, after Washington carried out raids a day earlier in response to attacks on American forces.

The toll is "eight pro-Iran fighters dead, including at least one Syrian, and Iraqi nationals", the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, following the strikes late Sunday on the Mayadeen and Albu Kamal areas of Syria's eastern Deir Ezzor province near the Iraqi border.

Thousands of people appear to have fled from Gaza's largest hospital as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle outside its gates, but hundreds of patients, including dozens of babies at risk of dying because of a lack of electricity, remained inside, health officials said Monday.

With only intermittent communications, it was difficult to reconcile competing claims from the Israeli military, which said it was providing a safe corridor for people to move south, and Palestinian health officials inside the hospital, who said the compound was surrounded by constant heavy gunfire.

The Israeli army’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, has said the Hezbollah attack on Israeli civilians on Sunday was “very serious.”

Hezbollah had wounded Sunday seven Israeli troops and 10 employees who were in Dovev to repair power lines downed by earlier strikes, according to Israel. Hezbollah said the guided missiles targeted a “logistical force belonging to the occupation army that was about to install transmission poles and eavesdropping and spying devices near the Dovev barracks.” Some of the wounded are in critical condition.

Israeli fighter jets pounded suspected Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon with air strikes on Sunday, after an incoming anti-tank missile wounded 10 Israeli civilians near the border, the Israeli army said.

The Israeli army said "a number of civilians were wounded" in the anti-tank missile strike near the village of Dovev, just half 800 meters from the frontier with Lebanon.