The Hamas-controlled health authority says 107 Palestinians have been killed within 24 hours in attacks by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip.

More than 140 others were injured during this period, the authority announced on Tuesday.

This brings the number of people killed in the coastal strip since the start of the war on October 7 to at least 27,585. Almost 67,000 others have been injured.

The figures cannot be independently verified.

Fighting has been particularly fierce for weeks in Khan Younis, a city in the south of the coastal strip.

Israel suspects the leadership of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement is sheltering in an underground network of tunnels there. It is also considered likely that hostages are being held there by Hamas.

On Monday evening, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced that the army would advance further into the city of Rafah, which lies on the border with Egypt.

Rafah, where around 200,000 people lived before the war, is currently crowded with more than 1 million Palestinians who have fled the fighting from other parts of the Gaza Strip.

Egypt, with which Israel has signed a peace treaty, is also opposed to an Israeli offensive in the border area. Cairo fears that military operations in Rafah could lead to a rush of desperate Palestinians fleeing to the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai, which would be completely unacceptable for Egypt.

The war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel’s history, carried out by militants from Hamas and other extremist Palestinian organizations on October 7 in Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip. More than 1,200 people were killed on the Israeli side.