At least 26 Palestinians, mostly children, were killed in an Israeli bombardment of Khan Younis city in south Gaza, media reported on Saturday.
Israel issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate west out of the line of fire and closer to humanitarian aid, in the latest indication that it plans to attack Hamas in south Gaza after subduing the north.
“We’re asking people to relocate. I know it’s not easy for many of them, but we don’t want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire,” Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC on Friday.
Such a move could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to relocate again, along with residents of Khan Younis, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.
Khan Younis has a population of more than 400,000.
Israel vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip following an Oct. 7 rampage into Israel in which its fighters killed 1,200 people and dragged 240 hostages into the enclave.
Since then, Israel has bombed much of Gaza City to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the entire northern half of the enclave and left homeless around two-thirds of the strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians.
Many of those who have fled fear their displacement could become permanent.
Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Friday to more than 12,000 people, 5,000 of them children. The United Nations deems those figures credible, though they are now updated infrequently due to the difficulty of collecting information.
Israel dropped leaflets over eastern areas of Khan Younis telling people to evacuate to shelters, suggesting that military operations there are imminent.
Regev said that Israeli troops will have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters from underground tunnels and bunkers, but that no such “enormous infrastructure” exists in less built-up areas to the west.
“I’m pretty sure that they won’t have to move again” if they move west, he continued. “We’re asking them to move to an area where hopefully there will be tents and a field hospital.”
Because the western areas are closer to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, humanitarian aid could be brought in “as quickly as possible,” he said.
Israeli forces are accused of ransacking al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where thousands of patients, medics and displaced people are trapped.
Al-Shifa Hospital administrators say 40 patients, including four premature babies, died since November 11 due to power outages, UN reports.
Israel to allow two fuel trucks per day into Gaza to power water and sewage operations. Aid groups say the amount is far from adequate.
The health system has collapsed in the Gaza Strip, just one element of a wider humanitarian crisis amid fears of disease and starvation.
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At least 12,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll from Hamas’s attacks stands at about 1,200.
