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.

Eight Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday.

Seven Palestinians were killed during an Israeli military raid on the northern city of Tulkarem, the health ministry and a local hospital said.

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.

Months after he was discharged from hospital, his right leg amputated, Mohammed Zendiq saw his image swirling online in a vicious disinformation campaign downplaying the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war.

The 16-year-old is one of many civilians on both sides caught in a haze of disinformation since Palestinian militants smashed through the highly militarised border on October 7, triggering an Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

The Israeli army on Tuesday announced the deaths of two more soldiers in Gaza, raising the number of troops killed in the Palestinian territory to 46 since the war began.

An army spokesman confirmed the new overall toll to AFP, after announcing two soldiers were killed in combat in northern Gaza on Monday.

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.

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."

The websites of the Beirut-based, pro-Iranian TV channel Al-Mayadeen have been blocked in Israel over "security" concerns, an official said Monday, as the war in Gaza raises worries of a regional conflict.

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.