DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel renewed calls Monday for mass evacuations from the southern town of Khan Younis, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks, as the military widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the Gaza Strip.
The expanded assault posed a deadly choice for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — either stay in the path of Israeli forces or flee to squeeze into progressively tinier slivers of the Gaza Strip, with no guarantee of safety. Aid workers warned that the mass movement would worsen the already dire humanitarian catastrophe in the territory.
“Another wave of displacement is underway, and the humanitarian situation worsens by the hour,” the Gaza chief of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, Thomas White, said in a post on X.
Israel has vowed to eliminate Gaza’s Hamas rulers, whose Oct. 7 attack into Israel triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of the territory’s population of 2.3 million people.
Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas — if that’s possible, given the group’s deep roots in Palestinian society — before any new cease-fire. But the mounting toll, which Palestinian health officials say has killed several hundred civilians since a weeklong truce ended Friday, is likely to further increase international pressure to return to the negotiating table.
It could also render even larger parts of the isolated territory uninhabitable.
Airstrikes and the ground offensive have transformed much of the north, including large areas in Gaza City, into a rubble-filled wasteland.
Hundreds of thousands of residents fled south during the assault. Now around 2 million people — most of the territory’s population — are crowded into the 230 square kilometers (90 square miles) that make up south and central Gaza, where Israel’s ground offensive is expanding. Their only escape is to other parts of that area, as both Israel and neighboring Egypt have refused to accept any refugees.
FIGHTING IN CENTRAL GAZA
Residents said Monday they heard airstrikes and explosions in and around Khan Younis overnight after the military dropped leaflets warning people to relocate farther south toward the border with Egypt.
The U.N. said Israel has ordered an area constituting about a fifth of Khan Younis to evacuate, an area that was home to some 117,000 people before the war and now hosts tens of thousands displaced from elsewhere. It said 21 shelters housing 50,000 people — the vast majority from northern Gaza — were in the evacuation zone. Large areas east of Khan Younis were also ordered to flee.
The military warned civilians Monday to avoid the main north-south highway between Khan Younis and the central town of Deir al-Balah, saying the road had become a “battlefield.” That indicated Israeli troops were approaching Khan Younis from the northeast, possibly with plans to cut central Gaza off from the south.
Al Jazeera television aired footage of medics rescuing people wounded by what appeared to have been a strike on a car on that stretch of highway. An Israeli tank could be seen just up the road.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said the army is pursuing Hamas with “maximum force” in the north and south while trying to minimize harm to civilians.
He pointed to a map that divides southern Gaza into dozens of blocks in order to give “precise instructions” to residents on where to evacuate.
