GAZA / CAIRO: Tens of thousands of fleeing Palestinians sought shelter on Friday as Israeli tanks pushed through the central Gaza Strip, with more than 180 people reported killed in 24 hours of airstrikes and artillery barrages on the shattered enclave.

Israeli warplanes attacking the south of Gaza flattened homes and buried families as they slept, residents said.

The assaults in central and southern Gaza propelled a new exodus of people already driven from other areas in what Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called an essential stage of Israel`s mission.

Israeli forces have laid much of the Gaza Strip to waste and the high death toll has caused concern even amongst its staunchest allies.

The US has called for it to scale down the war in coming weeks and move to targeted operations against Hamas leaders. So far, Israel shows no sign of doing so.

Nearly all of its 2.3 million people have fled their homes at least once and many are now on the move again, often reduced to taking shelter in makeshift tents or huddled under tarpaulins and plastic sheetson openground.

Gaza health authorities said 187 more Palestinians were confirmed killed in Israeli strikes in the last 24 hours, raising the toll to 21,507 about 1pc of Gaza`s population. Thousands more bodies are feared to be buried in the ruins of obliterated neighbourhoods.

In Rafah in the south, Reuters journalists at the scene of one airstrike that destroyed a building saw the head of a buried toddler sticking out of the rubble.

The child screamed as a rescue worker shielded his head with a hand, while another swung a sledgehammer at a chisel, trying to break up a slab of concrete to free him.

Neighbour Sanad Abu Tabet said the two-storey house had been crowded with displaced people. After morning broke, relatives went to collect the dead wrapped up in white shrouds. A man peeled away the cloth to stroke the face of a dead child.

Tens of thousands of Gazans are fleeing the crowded central districts of Bureij, Maghazi and Nusseirat, ordered out by Israeli forces whose tanks advanced from the north and east.

Most have made their way south or west to the already overwhelmed city of Deir al-Balah.

`We suffered a lot. We had the whole night without shelter, under rain and it was cold, we were with our kids and elderly women,` said Um Hamdi, a woman cooking porridge over an open woodfire surrounded by children.

Nearby, Abdel Nasser Awadallahstood inside a wooden frame set up to be wrapped in plastic to make a tent, and spoke of the family he had lost.

Accounts of mistreatment in prison Separately, three Palestinian brothers rounded up by Israel in the Gaza Strip said they and fellow detainees were beaten, stripped to their underwear, burnt with cigarettes and subjected to other forms of mistreatment during their detention.

The Yaseen brothers sheltering at Rafah said the Israeli military had not made specific accusations against them. They were rounded up together, then separated, as part of group arrests carried out by Israel`s military in areas that it advances into.

Sobhi Yaseen said he and his brothers Sady and Ibrahim were detained in early December after the Israeli military encircled the area where they lived and worked as day labourers in Gaza City`s Zeitoun neighbourhood.

He said four people beat him after he was unable to climb onto a truck due to a leg injury sustained before his arrest, and that he was then taken to an open area where captors were `smoking and putting out cigarettes on our backs, spraying sand and water on us, urinating on us`.

Sady said he was placed with other detainees in a truck containing garbage.

`They were beating us, and anyone who raised their voice after the beating was beaten again. They searched us, took our IDs, money, and phones,` he said, speaking among a group of about 20 men in a tent at the Rafah school, most wearing grey tracksuits issued by the Isr aeli milit ary.

Some showed large scabs and raw skin on their wrists where they said their hands had been bound or cuffed, and one showed bruised streaks and a round red scar on his back. Another showed a stitched scar on his thigh where he said he had been beaten.

Alarm over disease threat Meanwhile, World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday he was `very concerned` about the growing threat of infectious diseases in the Gaza Strip.

He said that since mid-October until mid-December, people living in shelters had continued to fall sick.

Tedros said that close to 180,000 people were suffering with upper respiratory infections, while 136,400 cases of diarrhoea have been recorded half of those among children aged under five.

The UN health agency chief said there had been 55,400 cases of lice and scabies; 5,330 cases of chickenpox; and 42,700 cases of skin rash, including 4722 cases of impetigo.-Agencies