Israel expanded evacuation orders in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip overnight Sunday (11), forcing tens of thousands of Palestinian residents and displaced families to leave in the dark as explosions from tank shelling reverberated around them.
The Israeli military said it was targeting militants from the Hamas group – which ran Gaza before the war – who were using those areas to carry out attacks and fire rockets.
On Saturday (10), an Israeli airstrike on a school where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in Gaza City killed at least 90 people, according to the civil defense service, sparking international protests.
The Israeli military said it attacked a command post of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, an allegation both groups rejected as a pretext, and killed 19 militants.
In Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, the evacuation instruction covered districts in the center, east and west, making it one of the largest such orders in the 10-month conflict, two days after tanks returned to the eastern Gaza Strip.
The announcement was posted on X and in text and audio messages to residents’ phones: “For your own safety, you must immediately evacuate to the newly created humanitarian zone.
The Israeli military said it had struck about 30 Hamas military targets in the previous 24 hours, including military structures, anti-tank missile launching posts and weapons storage facilities.
Forced to leave
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations, while their narrow strip of land has been largely reduced to a desert 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 being sent, were shelled several times by Israeli forces.
Tens of thousands of people left their homes and shelters in the middle of the night, heading west towards Mawasi and north towards Deir Al-Balah, already overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
“We are exhausted. This is the tenth time my family and I have had to leave our shelter,” said Zaki Mohammad, 28, who lives in the Hamad housing complex in western Khan Younis, where the occupants of two multi-storey buildings live.
“People are carrying their belongings, their children, their hopes and their fears and running towards the unknown because there is no safe place,” he told Reuters via a chat app. “We are running from death to death.”
Israel launched its attack on Gaza after Hamas fighters swept into the south of the country on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and capturing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli records.
Since then, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry.
Gaza health officials say most of the fatalities were civilians, but Israel says at least a third were fighters. Israel says it has lost 329 soldiers in Gaza.
Source: CNN Brasil
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