Crowds fleeing Khan Younis following an Israeli evacuation order were replaced by empty streets on Friday, as Palestinian residents sought to escape a new Israeli military operation in Gaza’s main southern sector.
“They threw leaflets at us and ordered us to evacuate,” Reem Abu Hayya told AFP, referring to leaflets the Israeli military drops from planes to order the evacuation of areas ahead of a military operation.
Evacuation orders were already in place in the Khan Younis region at the end of July, and the area was devastated by heavy fighting earlier this year.
“We don’t know where we are going, and there are sick and disabled people with us. Where can we go?” Abu Haya asked AFP, standing on the street in front of a building that had been reduced to a pile of iron rods and broken concrete.
In a besieged area that has been under constant bombardment for the past 10 months and where supplies are hard to come by, people on Thursday carried with them whatever belongings they could as they fled.
AFP journalists saw a young man carrying wooden planks tied into bundles, which were to be used as shelter structures or fuel in the near future.
Because of a shortage of petrol, only the luckiest of people drove, often with mattresses on the car roof. Most people walked. They carried their belongings in plastic and garbage bags, on donkey-drawn carts, bikes, strollers or wheelchairs.
By dusk, the streets of Khan Younis were deserted and silent, AFP journalists reported, with only ruins remaining of buildings damaged in earlier attacks.
The leaflet issued on Thursday ordered residents to leave eastern towns of Khan Yunis governorate, including Al-Salqa, Al-Qarara, Bani Suheila and neighbourhoods of Khan Yunis city.
“Hamas and terrorist organizations continue to fire rockets from your areas”, the leaflets warned, repeating previous orders that the Israeli military would “take strict action against these elements”.
Late last month, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said on the social media site X that only “14 percent of areas” in Gaza were not subject to evacuation orders.
On Friday, the army said it had launched a new operation in Khan Younis after receiving “intelligence indicating the presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure” there.
“Troops are fighting both above and below ground to eliminate terrorists in the area, as well as locating and destroying weapons and terrorist infrastructure,” the army said in a statement.
‘We are tired’
The army often returns to areas of Gaza where it had previously carried out major operations against Palestinian militants but later found them active again or acted based on intelligence about the location of hostages.
“Enough! For both, for the Jews and Hamas! Both should look at the people of Gaza, have mercy on us, for God’s sake,” Ahmed al-Najjar, angry at the prospect of war and another displacement, told AFP.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas Palestinian militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,198 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
At least 39,699 people have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s retaliatory military offensive, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, though the ministry did not give a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
Mohammed al-Farra from Sheikh Nasser, east of Khan Younis, also expressed frustration at his family’s multiple displacements.
“As soon as the military operation in our area ended, we first returned to our homes to escape the heat, displacement and hardship,” the 46-year-old told AFP.
“Then the occupiers came back and drove us out, causing us to suffer tragedies many times,” he said, referring to Israel.
“We are exhausted. The war must end immediately so that we can become human again, even if only a little.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
