The Israeli military has begun a renewed operation on Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, calling on residents to evacuate after missiles were fired into Israel from the area.
Evacuation orders are usually issued before a ground invasion, but the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have not sent in troops on the ground as of Tuesday afternoon.
Residents of eastern Khan Yunis reported heavy air strikes overnight after receiving a surprise call from the IDF to evacuate the area around the town’s European Hospital as a dangerous combat zone.
“Overnight, the IDF struck terror targets in the area from which the projectiles were fired,” the Israeli military said in a statement, adding that “precautionary measures to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians” were taken, including enabling evacuation.
Bassam Qudayh, a father of five who had to leave his own elderly parents behind, said: “What does it mean immediately? I swear I don’t know where I’m going. Our minds and bodies are scattered. We’re tired. I went out and I don’t know where I’m going with these poor kids.” He said they had no form of transportation to take them to the designated humanitarian safe zone of al-Mawasi, a small coastal area to the west of Khan Yunis.
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Despite senior Israeli military and political officials heralding the end of the most intense phase of fighting in the Gaza Strip, combat and airstrikes continue in both north and south Gaza, with raids continuing for a fifth day in Shejaiya, a neighbourhood in Gaza City, where two separate battles were fought between November and February.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, about 80,000 people in Shejaiya and the surrounding areas were told to evacuate and head south — but they are unable to cross through the Israeli checkpoint that separates the territory in half.
Three Israeli soldiers were killed on Monday night in the Rafah area of the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel maintains a presence to prevent smuggling attempts in undiscovered tunnels that run underneath the Egyptian border.
In Rafah, the Israeli army said they had discovered the “largest underground site” belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Islamist paramilitary organisation operating in the Gaza Strip. The IDF said it was used to produce long-range rockets to be fired at Israel.
The renewed fighting has left residents of Khan Yunis displaced once again, in a city where evacuees had set up homes in partially destroyed buildings. Evacuated Gazans said they had to spend the night on the streets, with no place left for them in the overcrowded safe zone, which they say is full of disease, insects and a lack of hygiene.
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“East Khan Yunis is evacuated once again — Khan Yunis, which already witnessed unprecedented destruction, but now the army decides to finish off the remaining rubble of this city,” said Muhammad Abu Teir, 52 who is from the Abasan al-Kabira area of eastern Khan Yunis. He and his seven children are homeless for the third time after evacuating Rafah, once home to the majority of Gaza’s displaced population.
“While families in other countries will go to sleep in a nice bed under the air conditioning, here I am, with thousands of families and their children, sleeping on the floor. We will spend our night in the street after our displacement from east Khan Yunis. There is no place for us and no land that can accommodate us,” he said.
