Thousands of Palestinians were fleeing Khan Younis in southern Gaza after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) once again bombarded the largely ruined city and ordered a mass evacuation of residents.
Witnesses reported strikes on Tuesday in and around the city, which came after the militant group Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas, claimed responsibility for a rare rocket barrage on Monday.
The Israeli military said about “20 projectiles were identified crossing from the area of Khan Younis”, most of which were intercepted. It reported no casualties and said its artillery was “striking the sources of the fire”.
The bombardment and evacuation orders suggested that troops could launch a new ground assault on the territory’s second largest city. Israeli forces fought for weeks in Khan Younis earlier this year and withdrew, claiming to have destroyed Hamas battalions.
“For your safety, you must evacuate immediately to the humanitarian zone,” the army spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted on X, addressing residents and displaced people.
Much of Khan Younis was destroyed in a long assault this year, but large numbers of Palestinians had moved back to escape another Israeli offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said the IDF was “making progress toward ending the phase of the destruction of Hamas’s terror army”, but that “there will be a continuation to strike its remnants”.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu restated his longstanding war aims. “The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives, including the destruction of Hamas and the release of all of our hostages,” he said.
Monday’s evacuation order also covered much of the Gaza Strip’s south-eastern corner, including the towns of al-Qarara and Bani Suhaila.
Faiza, 33, said she, her two sons and daughter had been displaced twice in recent months. “My house in Khan Younis was rubble, so I set up my tent above the rubble. Yesterday, the Israeli army informed us by a voice call to evacuate the eastern areas of Khan Younis. We spent the night kept awake by the intense bombing, and today we decided to leave immediately,” she said.
Mohamed, 70, said his family had been forced to abandon most of their belongings in Khan Younis. “We took just what we needed the most on our own backs or by riding a donkey cart, to save some money. My feeling has become like ashes. I have no feeling left, I am exhausted, I am no longer able to stand on my feet,” he said.
Israel’s army told people to move to al-Mawasi, a coastal area designated by the IDF as a safe zone, which has become filled with crowded and unsanitary tent camps.
International aid organisations have reported that the zone is massively congested and suffering from acute shortages of water. Sanitation is almost nonexistent, and raw sewage and mountains of rubbish have led to soaring infection rates.
“Garbage is just piling up. There’s not enough bins, garbage trucks, workers, and that is the same for everything, any basic service,” a UN official in Gaza said.
Israeli forces have been sent back into parts of Gaza where there was fierce fighting earlier in the conflict. Analysts and officials have said Hamas has been able to reform its fighting units in pockets of the north and centre of the territory.
Last week, the Israeli military ordered an evacuation from the northern Gaza district of Shuja’iya, which has been the focus of Israeli offensives, and intense fighting followed soon after.
Israeli military officials have described a shift to a third phase of fighting in Gaza, in which intermittent raids from troops based at strategic locations within the territory have replaced the major offensives of recent months.
A fresh offensive in the Khan Younis area could further hamper Palestinians’ access to much needed aid. The area surrounding the Kerem Shalom crossing, the major aid crossing to southern Gaza, is in the evacuation zone.
Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes, many of them more than once. Israeli restrictions, fighting and the breakdown of public order have hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid, fuelling widespread hunger and sparking fears of famine.
Israel, which has been under growing international pressure to relieve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, said on Tuesday it connected a power line to a desalination plant in the territory to provide additional drinking water.
Production will jump fourfold to 20,000 cubic metres of drinking water a day, the IDF said – a total that remains inadequate, according to aid officials.
Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians. The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, although the IDF says 42 of those are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive aimed at eradicating the Palestinian militants in Gaza has killed at least 37,900 people, according to Palestinian officials. About half of those fully identified so far were women or children. The IDF has accused Hamas of using civilian infrastructure and the wider population as human shields. The Islamist group denies the charge.
