More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis in four days as fierce fighting continues, the United Nations said on Friday, following an Israeli operation to remove the bodies of detainees from the area.
The UN humanitarian aid agency, OCHA, said recent “intensified hostilities” in the Khan Younis area, more than nine months after the Israel-Hamas war, had led to “new waves of internal displacement in Gaza”.
It said “approximately 182,000 people” had been displaced from central and eastern Khan Yunis between Monday and Thursday, and that hundreds of people “remain stranded in eastern Khan Yunis.”
The Israeli military on Monday ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern city and announced that its forces would take “forceful action” there, including in an area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.
On Wednesday, Israel said the bodies of five detainees captured during the October 7 Hamas attack that triggered the war had been recovered from the area.
The Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had “eliminated nearly 100 terrorists” in the city this week.
Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said the detainees’ bodies were removed from underground tunnels and walls in “a secret location.”
“In the past, soldiers have been near those dead bodies, but until this week we did not know how to reach them,” Halevi said in a statement.
Witnesses and rescue workers said heavy fighting continued around eastern Khan Younis on Friday. Nasir Hospital said 26 bodies had been brought to the site.
The attacks on southern Israel on October 7 killed 1,197 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Of the 251 people taken hostage that day, 111 are still being held in the Gaza Strip, 39 of whom the military says are dead.
At least 39,175 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in Israeli counter-attacks against Hamas, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Most of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once by the fighting, according to UN data.
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