Israeli forces killed at least 12 Palestinians in a dawn airstrike on Rafah in southern Gaza yesterday and fighting raged in several other areas of the coastal enclave, Gaza medics said.

Israel pressed on with its offensive on Rafah a day after saying its forces had taken control of a buffer zone along the nearby border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, giving it effective authority over Gaza's entire land frontier.

Gaza medical sources said the 12 Palestinians, whom it said were civilians, had been killed and an unspecified number of others wounded in an Israeli airstrike as they tried to recover the body of a civilian in the centre of Rafah.

Another Palestinian civilian was killed in an airstrike on Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City in the north of the densely populated enclave, the medics said.

Communication services were cut off in Rafah, Palestinian telecommunications company Jawa said in a statement.

Israel has kept up raids on Rafah despite an order by the International Court of Justice, the top U.N. court, to halt the attacks.

More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's air and land war across all of Gaza, with 53 of those killed in the past 24 hours, the Hamas-run enclave's health ministry said.

The US has, with Egypt and Qatar, been involved in efforts to mediate indirect talks between Israel and Hamas on arranging a ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages. Those talks have stalled, with both sides blaming the other for the lack of progress.

Hamas said yesterday they would not continue negotiations during the "aggression", but were ready for a "complete agreement" if Israel halts the war.

As the war drags on, malnutrition has become widespread in Gaza as aid deliveries have slowed to a trickle, and the United Nations has warned of incipient famine.

Offering one possible lifeline, the Israeli military has lifted a ban on the sale of food to Gaza from Israel and the occupied West Bank since the start of the Rafah operation.

The conflict has also stoked violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, another territory where Palestinians seek statehood.

On another front, the leader of Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis said they would escalate their operations "in quality and quantity".