Fighting has returned to Gaza City, forcing Palestinians to flee under heavy bombardment. The Israeli military has issued an evacuation order for an area it had declared clear of Hamas militants.
The flare-up in the northern Gaza Strip’s Shejaiya district, which witnesses and medics said caused numerous casualties, comes as fears grow of a wider regional conflagration involving Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.
The Israeli military has not commented on the reports, but it did order residents to evacuate and head south.
The Pentagon was also reported to be moving warships to be ready to evacuate Americans from Israel and Lebanon as cross-border attacks intensified, according to the broadcaster NBC, citing unnamed military officials.
The USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship, and marines from the 24th Expeditionary Unit, moved into the Mediterranean on Wednesday to join the dock landing ship USS Oak Hill and another ship in their amphibious ready group, according to the Marine Corps.
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Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, on a visit to Washington to discuss the Gaza crisis and ways to avoid broader conflict in the Middle East, said his country did not want war but warned fighting on a massive scale would send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age”.
In Gaza, fighting has continued despite comments on Sunday by Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, that the “intense phase” of the war — now nearing its 10th month — was winding down.
Officials and medics in the Hamas-run territory said Israeli strikes overnight and early on Thursday killed at least seven people in northern Gaza, and the Israeli military said it had “attacked terrorists in Khan Yunis” in the south.
Avichay Adraee, an Israeli Defence Forces spokesman, told residents and displaced Gazans in the Shujaiya area to leave “for your safety”, in a message posted on social media.
They were asked to head south, to a declared “humanitarian zone” about 25km (15 miles) away.
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Hamas said Israeli forces were “starting a ground incursion”, and reported “several” dead as “thousands flee under relentless bombing”.
A displaced Gazan woman, who asked not to be named, told the AFP news agency that she was “devastated” by the violence and destruction. “We lost our children and homes, and we keep fleeing from place to another.”
Another Gaza City resident said it had “sounded as if the war is restarting”.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,765 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from Gaza’s health ministry, which is run by Hamas.
Israel in early January announced it had dismantled “Hamas’s military framework” in Gaza’s north, which saw the most intense fighting in the early stages of the war, but militants have since regrouped.
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In a rare medical evacuation from Gaza, 21 cancer patients left through the Kerem Shalom crossing on the Israeli border, a medical source in Egypt said.
It was the first evacuation since the closure of the Rafah border crossing which Israeli forces took over on the Palestinian side in early May.
US officials have voiced hope a Gaza ceasefire could also lead to a reduction in hostilities between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have traded near daily cross-border fire since early October.
In the latest clashes on Thursday, Hezbollah said it fired rockets at an Israeli military base and sent drones in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Lebanon, which killed four fighters according to the group.
Israel said its air defences “intercepted most of the launches”, reporting no casualties.
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Hezbollah, which commands thousands of battle hardened soldiers and hundreds of thousands of missiles, fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006 that ended in a stalemate. During that conflict US troops and ships helped evacuate some civilians and foreign nationals from Lebanon.
