The Israeli army said it had struck about 30 Hamas military targets in the past 24 hours
Khan Younis, Gaza:
Israel overnight extended the evacuation order in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, forcing tens of thousands of Palestinian residents and displaced families to leave in the dark as explosions from tank shelling echoed around them.
The Israeli army said it attacked operatives from the Hamas group – which governed Gaza before the war – who used these areas to carry out attacks and fire rockets.
On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike on a school where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in Gaza City killed at least 90 people, according to the Civil Defense Agency, sparking international outrage.
The Israeli army said it had attacked a militant command post of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a claim the two groups rejected as a pretext, and killed 19 officers.
In Khan Younis in southern Gaza Strip, the evacuation order covered districts in the center, east and west, making it one of the largest such orders in the 10-month conflict, coming two days after tanks returned to eastern Gaza. the city.
The announcement was posted on X and in text and audio messages on residents’ phones: “For your own safety, you must immediately evacuate to the newly created humanitarian zone. The area you are in is considered a dangerous combat zone.”
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said people in Gaza were trapped with nowhere to go.
“Some can only carry their children, some carry their entire lives in one small bag. They go to crowded places where the shelters are already overcrowded with families. They have lost everything and need everything,” he said.
The Israeli army said it had struck about 30 Hamas military targets in the past 24 hours, including military structures, anti-tank missile launch sites and weapons storage facilities.
Islamic Jihad’s armed wing said fighters fired mortar bombs at Israeli forces gathered in the eastern areas of Khan Younis.
Later on Sunday, an Israeli airstrike near the Khan Younis market in the city center killed four Palestinians and injured several others, doctors said.
Lines of smoke rose from areas where Israeli aircraft carried out attacks in the eastern and western parts of the city. Residents said two multi-storey buildings were bombed.
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza since the war broke out last October, with the toll rising by the day, Gaza’s Health Ministry says.
Health officials in Gaza say most of the fatalities are civilians, but Israel says at least a third are fighters. Israel says it has lost 329 soldiers in Gaza.
Israel began its assault on Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and capturing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Tens of thousands forced to leave at night
According to the United Nations, most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been driven from their homes, with their narrow strip of land largely reduced to a wasteland of rubble.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say there are no safe areas in the enclave. Areas designated as humanitarian zones, such as Al-Mawasi in western Khan Younis where residents were sent, have been bombed several times by Israeli forces.
Tens of thousands left their homes and shelters in the middle of the night and headed west toward Mawasi and north toward Deir Al-Balah, which was already overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
“We are exhausted. This is the tenth time that me and my family have to leave our shelter,” said Zaki Mohammad, 28, who lives in the Hamad housing project in western Khan Younis, where residents of two multi-storey buildings live. were ordered to leave.
“People carry their belongings, their children, their hopes and their fears and run into the unknown because there is no safe place,” he told Reuters via a chat app. “We’re running from death to death.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)