Israel extended evacuation orders overnight in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, forcing thousands of Palestinian residents and displaced families to flee in the dark as tank explosions rumbled around them.
The Israeli military said it was attacking militants from the Hamas group – which ruled Gaza before the war – who were using the areas to launch attacks and fire rockets.
At least 90 people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a school in Gaza City on Saturday, according to the civil protection service, sparking international outrage.
The Israeli military said it had attacked Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant command posts, though both groups have rejected the accusation as a pretext, and killed 19 militants.
In Khan Younis, south of the Gaza Strip, the evacuation directive covered districts in the center, east and west, making it one of the biggest orders in the 10-month-old conflict, after tanks withdrew to the east of the city two days ago.
The announcement was posted on X and sent to residents’ phones via text and audio message: “For your own safety, you must immediately leave the newly created humanitarian zone. The area you are in is considered a dangerous war zone.”
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), said people were trapped in Gaza and had no place to go.
“Some people can only take their children with them, some people carry their whole life in a small backpack. They are going to crowded places, where shelters are already full of families. They have lost everything and they need everything,” he said.
The Israeli military said it had struck nearly 30 Hamas military targets in the past 24 hours, including military structures, anti-tank missile launch posts and weapons storage facilities.
The armed wing of Islamic Jihad said fighters fired mortar bombs at Israeli forces gathered in areas east of Khan Younis.
Four Palestinians were killed and several others injured in Israeli air strikes near the Khan Younis market in the city centre on Sunday, doctors said.
Plumes of smoke rose from the eastern and western areas of the city where Israeli aircraft struck. Residents said two multi-storey buildings were bombed.
The Gaza Health Ministry says nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since the war began last October and the number is rising by the day.
Gaza health officials say most of the deaths were civilians, but Israel says at least a third were combatants. Israel says 329 of its soldiers have been killed in Gaza.
Israel launched its assault on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas fighters crossed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Thousands of people were forced to leave their homes overnight
According to the United Nations, most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes, while their narrow strip of land has largely been transformed into a wasteland of rubble.
Palestinian and UN officials say there are no safe zones in the enclave. Areas designated as humanitarian zones, such as al-Mawasi in western Khan Younis, where residents were being sent, have been bombed several times by the Israeli military.
Thousands of people fled their homes and shelters in the middle of the night, heading west to Mawasi and north to Deir al-Balah, which was already filled with millions of displaced people.
“We are exhausted. This is the 10th time me and my family have had to leave our shelter,” said Zaki Mohammed, 28, who lives in the Hamad Housing Project in western Khan Yunis, where residents of two multi-storey buildings were ordered to leave.
“People are running into the unknown, carrying their belongings, their children, their hopes and their fears, because there is no safe place,” he told Reuters via a chat app. “We are 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.)
