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Elon Musk’s X has not paid a fine imposed for failing to outline its plans to stamp out content depicting child sexual abuse on the platform, Australia’s internet safety watchdog told AFP on Tuesday.

Last month, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant slapped an Aus$610,500 (US$388,000) fine on the company formerly known as Twitter for failing to respond to questions she sent in February, criticising the company’s “empty talk” on the issue.

X was given until the end of October to pay the fine, request an extension or ask for the fine to be withdrawn. The company had requested an extension which expired last Friday.

“Twitter/X has not paid the infringement notice within the allotted timeframe and eSafety is now considering further steps,” a spokesperson for Inman Grant told AFP.

X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Inman Grant — herself a former Twitter employee — last month urged X to show it was taking “tangible action” to clean up the platform.

“Twitter/X has stated publicly that tackling child sexual exploitation is the number one priority for the company, but it can’t just be empty talk,” she said at the time.

Billionaire Musk has slashed more than 80 percent of X’s global workforce since his takeover, including many of the content moderators who are responsible for stamping out abusive content.

Proactive detection of child sexual exploitation on X fell from 90 percent to 75 percent in the three months after the takeover, Inman Grant said.

Australia has spearheaded the global drive to regulate social media platforms and it is not the first time Inman Grant has singled out X or Musk.

In June this year, she raised concerns about a spike in more general “toxicity and hate” following Musk’s takeover in October last year.

Gaza’s biggest hospital has buried 179 people, including babies, in a “mass grave” inside its compound, Al Shifa Hospital chief Mohammad Abu Salmiyah said Tuesday, underlining the catastrophic humanitarian crisis developing at medical facilities across the region.

“We were forced to bury them in a mass grave,” the hospital director said. Seven babies and 29 patients from the intensive care unit were buried after the hospital’s fuel supplies ran out.

“There are bodies littered in the hospital complex. There is no more electricity…”

A journalist, who is collaborating with AFP, said the stench of decomposing bodies was everywhere.

A surgeon at the hospital, working with Doctors Without Borders, called the situation “inhuman”.

“We don’t have electricity. There’s no water in the hospital. There’s no food.”

The Al Shifa Hospital is Gaza City’s largest and was cut off from the world for over 72 hours last week after a deadly blockade by Israeli forces that included tanks at the front gates; Tel Aviv insists the hospital sits atop a network of tunnels that form part of the Hamas’ underground headquarters.

Israel has accused the terror group of using hospitals and patients as human shields, an accusation the Hamas and Gaza health officials have denied. In a separate incident, Israel claimed to have discovered a tunnel leading into another hospital from the home of a known Hamas operative.

The United Nations believes thousands, and perhaps more than 10,000 – including patients, staff and displaced civilians – may be inside and unable to escape because of fierce fighting nearby.

Hospitals, and medical personnel, are protected under international humanitarian law and parties in conflict must ensure their protection. They cannot be used to shield military objectives from attack, but any operation around or within must protect patients, staff, and other civilians, the United Nations’ Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its Monday update from Gaza.

Israel had pledged to help evacuate the babies. That has not happened so far.

Earlier today, a heart-breaking image emerged from the same hospital – of seven babies bundled together, some in non-descript, hospital-green fabric and others with tubes sticking out of them.

READ | Gaza Babies Laid In Rows For Warmth; “I Had 39, Now 36 Left”, Says Doctor

“Yesterday I had 39 babies… today 36,” Dr Mohamed Tabasha, the paediatric head, told Reuters Monday. “I cannot say how long they can last. I can lose another two babies today… or in an hour.”