Photos: Hundreds queue up for food in central Gaza

Palestinians hold containers to collect free food handouts from a volunteer hospice in Rafah, southern Gaza. Israel kept up heavy bombing of Gaza on Monday as it faced accusations from a human rights group that it is deliberately starving Palestinians in its campaign sparked by the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Fighting raged on in the third month of the bloodiest ever Gaza war, with the Hamas-run health ministry reporting another 110 people killed in strikes on Jabalia, outside Gaza City, since Sunday.

The UN Security Council in New York was set to vote later in the day on another call for a ceasefire in the besieged territory after previous bids were vetoed by Israel's key ally, the United States.

A Palestinian child reacts while people gather to get their share of charity food offered by volunteers amid food shortages in the southern Gaza Strip.

And Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin was expected back in Israel on Monday as part of a Middle East tour aimed at stopping the conflict from spreading further.

The war broke out when Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on October 7, killing around 1,140 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures, and abducting 250.

Gaza's health ministry says Israel's military response has killed more than 18,800 people, primarily women and children while reducing vast areas to rubble. International alarm has mounted over the dire plight of 2.4 million Gazans now enduring bombardment, food and water shortages, mass displacement and plummeting winter temperatures.

The New York-based campaign group Human Rights Watch charged that Israel "is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime".

"Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food and fuel, while wilfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival," it wrote in a report. The Israeli government hit back, accusing HRW of being an "anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli organisation".

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, earlier said that he "would not be surprised if people start dying of hunger, or a combination of hunger, disease, weak immunity".