Gaza City, Palestinian Territories (AFP)-The head of Gaza’s largest hospital on Tuesday said 21 children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in the Palestinian territory in the past three days, amid a devastating assault by Israeli forces.

Gaza’s population of more than two million people is facing severe shortages of food and other essentials, with residents frequently killed as they try to collect humanitarian aid at a handful of distribution points.

“Twenty-one children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in various areas across the Gaza Strip,” Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza, told reporters.

The doctor said the deaths had been recorded at multiple hospitals during the past 72 hours.

The announcement came just hours after Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes had killed 15 people, after the World Health Organization said Israel attacked its facilities amid expanding ground operations.

Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that Israeli strikes on the Al-Shati camp west of Gaza City killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 50.

Authorities in the Hamas-run territory say more than 59,000 people have been killed during the 21-month war.

Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced at least once during the conflict and the Al-Shati camp — on the Mediterranean coast — hosts thousands of people displaced from the north in tents and makeshift shelters.

Raed Bakr, 30, lives with his three children and said he heard “a massive explosion” at about 1:40 am on Tuesday (2240 GMT Monday), which blew their tent away.

“I felt like I was in a nightmare. Fire, dust, smoke and body parts flying through the air, dirt everywhere. The children were screaming,” Bakr, whose wife was killed last year, told AFP.

Reports of the latest death toll came as the Roman Catholic church’s most senior cleric in the Holy Land said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “morally unacceptable”.

“We have seen men holding out in the sun for hours in the hope of a simple meal,” Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa told a news conference in Jerusalem after visiting the war-torn Palestinian territory.