Martyrs' toll hits 10,328 as Israel gives Gaza residents four hours to leave

GAZA, Palestine (AFP/Reuters) - Gaza's Health Ministry Tuesday said that 10,328 people have been martyred in the month-long war with Israel.

Thousands of children are among those killed in Gaza since October 7, when Israel launched a blistering assault in response to a deadly attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants.

Israel gave civilians still trapped inside freshly encircled Gaza City a four hour window to leave on Tuesday, and residents escaping said they passed tanks in position to possibly begin storming it.

Israel says its forces have surrounded Gaza City, home to a third of the enclave's 2.3 million people, and are poised to storm it soon in their campaign to annihilate the Hamas Islamists who attacked Israeli towns exactly a month ago.

"It has been one full month of carnage, of incessant suffering, bloodshed, destruction, outrage and despair," UN Human Rights Commissioner Volcker Turk said in a statement at the start of a trip to the region, during which he will visit the Rafah crossing from Egypt, the sole route for aid. "Human rights violations are at the root of this escalation and human rights play a central role in finding a way out of this vortex of pain."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would consider 'tactical little pauses' in Gaza fighting to let hostages leave or aid enter, but again rejected increasingly forceful calls for a ceasefire.

'GRAVEYARD FOR CHILDREN'

Unrelenting horror stories of civilian suffering on both sides have polarised world opinion over the past month and show no sign of easing. In Shefayim, Israel, Avihai Brodutch described 31 days of agony after Hamas abducted his wife and three children from Kfar Aza, a kibbutz about three km (2 miles) from Gaza.

"My kids, they're so young, and they've done nothing wrong to anybody," he said of his 10-year-old daughter Ofri and sons Yuval, eight, an  Uriah, four.

"It's just a horror movie that keeps putting on repeat," Suzan Beseiso, a 31-year-old Palestinian-American who managed to leave Gaza for Egypt last week, told Reuters in Cairo. "No sleep. No food. No water. You keep evacuating from one place to another."

Her own escape was fraught with danger from Israeli bombardment on the route out, she said.