About two million people – most of the territory’s population – are stuck in the southern and central Gaza Strip, where the Israeli ground offensive is currently moving.
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Israeli warplanes heavily bombed an area around Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday as the military ordered mass evacuations from the city amid a widening ground offensive.
Palestinians are being pushed into an ever-shrinking portion of the besieged area, raising sharp questions about what will happen to them.
The widespread attack presented hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with a deadly choice: either stay in the way of Israeli forces or flee within the borders of the southern Gaza Strip with no guarantee of safety.
Aid workers warned that the mass movement would worsen an already dire humanitarian disaster in the area.
“Another wave of displacement is underway and the humanitarian situation is deteriorating by the hour,” Thomas White, the Gaza chief of the U.N. Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Compounding the chaos, telephone and internet networks across the Gaza Strip collapsed again on Monday evening, Palestinian telecommunications provider PalTel reported.
The network failed several times during the war, leaving residents unable to communicate with each other or the outside world for hours or sometimes days until it was repaired.
Human Rights Watch has previously warned of the risk of such communications outages Cover for atrocities in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has vowed to eliminate Hamas, whose attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7 killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and sparked the deadliest violence in decades.
The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-quarters of the territory’s 2.3 million residents. Palestinian health authorities say several hundred civilians have been killed in the bombing since a week-long ceasefire ended on Friday.
Already under increasing pressure from its main ally, the United States, Israel appears intent on dealing a death blow to Hamas – if possible, given the group’s deep roots in Palestinian society – before a new ceasefire. But the rising toll will increase international pressure to return to the negotiating table.
Air strikes and the ground offensive in the northern Gaza Strip have turned large parts of Gaza City and neighboring areas into a rubble-filled wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled south during the attack.
Since the ceasefire collapsed, the military has displaced the population from a roughly 62 square kilometer area in and around Khan Younis, according to Israeli military evacuation maps. This reduces the space available to Palestinians by more than a quarter.
Fighting in the central Gaza Strip
Constant bombardment on the outskirts of Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, lit up the sky over the city on Monday evening, and a stream of ambulances carrying the wounded, including several women and children, streamed to the main hospital.
In recent days, Israeli attacks have been “severe in scale,” said Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, an aid worker with the Medical Aid to Palestinians group in Khan Younis. “Hardly any kind of aid has been delivered to the people and there is no longer any food in the shops.”
He said neighborhoods and shelters were emptying as people fled. Leaflets dropped by the Israeli military warn people not to head south towards the border with Egypt. Yet they cannot leave Gaza because both Israel and neighboring Egypt have refused to accept refugees.
The area ordered by Israel covers about a fifth of Khan Younis. Before the war, about 117,000 people lived in the area, and now it is also home to more than 50,000 people displaced from the north, living in 21 shelters, the UN said.
It was not known how many fled. Some Palestinians have ignored previous evacuation orders, saying they do not feel safer because areas where they are supposed to flee have also been bombed. Many also fear that they will never be allowed to return to their homes.
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It was not clear where Israeli troops had advanced into southern Gaza, but the military urged people to stay away from the main road between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, suggesting troops were moving between the two cities .
Satellite photos on Sunday showed around 150 Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers nearly 6 kilometers north of the heart of Khan Younis.
Israeli media also reported heavy fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants in the north of the Gaza Strip – in the Jabaliya refugee camp and the Shijaiya district of Gaza City, both scenes of heavy bombardment and fighting in recent weeks.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israeli military spokesman, said the army was pursuing Hamas in the north and south with “maximum force” while trying to minimize damage to civilians.
He pointed to a map that divides southern Gaza into dozens of blocks to give residents “precise instructions” on where to evacuate. Most are being urged to flee south, but confusingly, a map published by the military on X on Monday urged people to flee to Fakhari, a district east of Khan Younis that the military had ordered evacuated a day earlier.
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“The level of human suffering is unbearable,” said Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, during a rare visit to Gaza. “It is unacceptable that civilians in Gaza do not have a safe place to go, nor is an adequate humanitarian response possible at this time given the military siege.”
The World Health Organization said Israel had told it to empty its medical supplies warehouse in southern Gaza within 24 hours ahead of an advanced ground operation. COGAT, an Israeli Defense Ministry body that deals with Palestinian civil affairs, denied having issued such an order.
Spoljaric, the Red Cross president, called for the immediate release of scores of hostages still being held by Palestinian militants since the Oct. 7 attack.
In a letter to the head of the Red Cross, a group of released Israeli hostages asked to meet with her during her visit to the region and called for more help from the organization in freeing the remaining 137 prisoners.
“Every day that passes could be their last, and the suffering they endure is inhumane,” wrote the eight freed prisoners and 102 relatives of hostages still in captivity.
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Rising toll
The Ministry of Health in Gaza said the death toll in the territory since October 7 had exceeded 15,890 people – 70% of them women and children – and more than 42,000 had been injured. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.
Health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said hundreds had been killed or injured since the end of the ceasefire, with many still trapped under rubble.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah received 32 bodies overnight after Israeli attacks in the central Gaza Strip, said Omar al-Darawi, an administration official.
The Israeli military said aircraft struck about 200 Hamas targets overnight while ground troops operated in “parallel,” without elaborating. It said troops in northern Gaza uncovered two militant tunnel shafts containing explosives and weapons at a school under attack.
It is not possible to independently confirm battlefield reports from either side.
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Israel says it has targeted Hamas operatives, blaming the militants for civilian casualties and accusing them of operating in residential neighborhoods. However, it does not provide a breakdown of its targets into individual attacks.