The Israeli army carried out new deadly attacks on Wednesday on the large besieged town of Khan Younes in the southern Gaza Strip, where residents are trying to shelter from some of the fiercest bombing and fighting in two months in the war against Hamas.
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Palestinians in Gaza were living “in complete terror,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, fearing “atrocities” two months into the war sparked by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s bloody attack on Israel on May 7. October.
The streets of Khan Younes, where ground troops are also deployed, were almost empty on Wednesday as the dead and wounded continued to stream into hospitals, AFP journalists at the scene reported.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians are crowding into this city and its surroundings, many already displaced since the start of the war, in a catastrophic humanitarian situation and forced to relocate to an increasingly crowded area near the closed border with Egypt.
Thousands of them continue to flee on foot, piled into carts or with their luggage on the roofs of their cars, heading south and into the neighboring town of Rafah, following orders from the Israeli army.
“We want to understand”
“The entire city is suffering from incessant destruction and bombing. “Many people are arriving from the north in catastrophic conditions and without shelter in search of their children,” Hassan Al-Qadi, a resident of Khan Younes who was displaced to Rafah, told AFP.
“We want to understand. If they want to kill us, they should surround us in one place and destroy us all together. But it’s not fair to force us to move from one place to another. We are not just numbers. We are human beings,” he added.
Fadi Al-Ashi, a resident of northern Gaza City, arrived in Rafah after a long hike.
“Before we arrived here, we were housed in eight or nine houses,” says this man, who walked to Rafah, “because there were no cars or other means of transportation.”
Since October 27, the Israeli army has been carrying out a ground offensive against Hamas in northern Gaza in parallel to its offensive campaign, expanding its ground operations throughout the territory and announcing on Tuesday that it had surrounded Khan Younes.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, Israeli bombings have killed 16,248 people, more than 70% women, children and teenagers, in the Gaza Strip since October 7.
In Israel, the attack that day by Hamas commandos who infiltrated from Gaza claimed 1,200 lives, mostly civilians, according to authorities.
“We have secured many Hamas strongholds in the northern Gaza Strip and are now conducting operations against their strongholds in the south,” Army Chief of Staff General Herzi said on Tuesday. Halevi.
“Our forces find weapons in almost every building and house, terrorists in many houses and confront them,” he added.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad sources told AFP that their fighters confronted Israeli troops to prevent them from entering Khan Yunis and areas east of the city, as well as refugee camps nearby.
According to the Hamas government, artillery fire caused “dozens of deaths and injuries” in several villages east of Khan Younes on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday.
The army continued to shell the entire Gaza Strip and said it hit about 250 targets in 24 hours. It announced that it had killed “most of the senior commanders” of the Hamas brigades operating from a network of tunnels in northern Gaza.
The army demanded on Wednesday that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) be given access to the 138 hostages still being held by Hamas and affiliated groups in Gaza. “The Israeli army will do everything in its power to free our hostages (…) We call on others to do the same,” said its spokesman Daniel Hagari.
According to the Hamas Health Ministry, airstrikes on the central Noseirat camp killed six people and injured 14. According to the same source, further attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp in the north left several people dead and injured.
Help with cutting
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), Rafah is currently the only location in the territory that has been completely besieged by Israel since October 9 and where humanitarian aid is still being distributed in large quantities.
Aid has virtually stopped arriving in Khan Younes and access to areas further north has been cut off since fighting resumed.
The army drops leaflets on Khan Younes daily, warning of an impending bombardment and urging residents to leave their neighborhood.
But the UN, which has calculated that 28% of Gaza’s territory now falls under these evacuation orders, found it “impossible” to establish safe zones to accommodate civilians, as set by Israel.
“Here we wander the vast expanse of God’s earth, looking for a place to find refuge. “It seems that there is no place where we can find shelter,” Oumm Mahmud Tanasi, a resident of Khan Younes on the way to Rafah on the border with Egypt, lamented to AFP.
“Not a safe place”
“No place in Gaza is safe. Neither hospitals, nor shelters, nor refugee camps. Nobody is safe. Not even the children. Neither do healthcare workers. Not even the humanitarian aid workers. This blatant disregard for the fundamentals of humanity must end,” said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.
Every day at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, the largest in southern Gaza, the same scenes of chaos are repeated as in the city’s other hospitals, where the wounded gather, sometimes lying in simple trailers or being transported by their loved ones.
“I do not know what happened. There was an explosion and I was hit in the head by shrapnel. I immediately threw myself to the ground,” Mohamed al-Maqadma, a man injured by a blow to the head and being treated at the Red Crescent Hospital in Khan Younes, told AFP.
According to the United Nations, 1.9 million people, or about 85% of the population, have been displaced by the war in the Gaza Strip, where more than half of the homes have been destroyed or damaged.
In retaliation for the Hamas attack, Israel vowed to destroy the Islamist movement that has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007 and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
According to the army, a total of 83 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began.
