Gaza City, Gaza - Two dozen patients at Gaza's main hospital have died within 48 hours due to power outages caused by Israel's unrelenting assault on the strip and its medical facilities, according to local health authorities.

The announcement came shortly after Israel agreed to a US request to allow two fuel trucks a day into Gaza, following a UN warning that the shortages had halted aid deliveries and put people at imminent risk of starvation. That amounts to some 16,000 gallons, less than a quarter of what was entering the territory before the war broke out.

The situation was dire at the Al-Shifa hospital, which Israel's army is still searching for suspected Hamas hideouts.

The hospital, medical aid organizations, and the militants themselves have rejected an Israeli charge that there is a command center at the facility, where thousands of people, including wounded patients and premature babies – three of whom have already died – are sheltering.

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IDF forces have so far produced limited evidence for their claims, including some weapons found in the hospital and what they say is the entrance to a tunnel. No independent verification is possible, and a complete telecommunications blackout has mostly silenced voices coming out of Al-Shifa.

"The situation in Al-Shifa is catastrophic" for patients, displaced people and health workers who are crammed inside without electricity, water and food, the hospital's director, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, told AFP on the phone later during a brief restoration of communications.

In the face of global outrage, Israel has defended its Al-Shifa operation, with its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, alleging that hostages may even have been held there.

"If they were, they were taken out," he told CBS Evening News.

The military also said troops had recovered the remains of kidnapped soldier Noa Marciano "from a structure adjacent to Al-Shifa hospital". It had confirmed her death this week, without giving the cause. Hamas said she had been killed in Israeli bombing.

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On Thursday, the army said soldiers near Al-Shifa found the body of another hostage, Yehudit Weiss, who had been kidnapped from the kibbutz community of Beeri.

More than half of Gaza's hospitals are no longer functional due to combat, damage, or shortages. Palestinians fear there is worse to come as Israel began airdropping fliers urging people who had fled to the south to relocate again as it expands its assault.

Israeli airstrikes have continuously pummeled areas that were previously advertised as safe, squeezing hundreds of thousands of people into ever smaller zones.