Thousands of Palestinian civilians trudged in a forlorn procession out of the north of Gaza on Wednesday seeking refuge from Israeli air strikes and fierce ground fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants.
The exodus took place in a four-hour window of opportunity announced by Israel, which has told residents to evacuate the north encircled by its armoured forces or risk being trapped in the violence.
But the central and southern parts of the small, besieged Palestinian enclave also came under fire again as the war between its Islamist Hamas rulers and Israel entered its second month.
Palestinian health officials said an air strike that hit houses in the Nusseirat refugee camp killed 18 people on Wednesday morning. In Khan Younis, six people, including a young girl, were killed in an air strike.
“We were sitting in peace when all of a sudden an F16 air strike landed on a house and blew it up, the entire block, three houses next to each other,” said a witness, Mohammed Abu Daqa.
“Civilians, all of them civilians. An old woman, an old man and there are others still missing under the rubble.”
Gaza City, the Hamas militant group’s main stronghold in the territory, is now surrounded by Israeli forces.
The military said troops have advanced to the heart of the densely-populated city while Hamas says its fighters have inflicted heavy losses.
Chief Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said combat engineers were using explosive devices to destroy a Hamas tunnel network that stretches for hundreds of kilometres beneath Gaza.
In a statement on Wednesday, the military said it had destroyed 130 tunnel shafts so far.
“Combat engineers fighting in Gaza are destroying the enemy’s weapons and are locating, exposing and detonating tunnel shafts,” it said.
Air strikes had also killed a Hamas weapons maker, Mahsein Abu Zina, and several fighters, the Israeli military said.
Israeli tanks have met heavy resistance from Hamas fighters using the tunnels to stage ambushes, according to sources with Hamas and the separate Islamic Jihad militant group. Israel says 33 of its soldiers have been killed.
Palestinian officials said 10,569 people have now been killed, 40% of them children. The level of death and suffering is “hard to fathom”, U.N. health agency spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said in Geneva.
The war has descended into the bloodiest episode in the generations-long Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Thousands of Palestinians fleeing from the north wearily made their way in a long line past wrecked and bomb-scarred buildings, witnesses said.
The Israeli military had told them they should move south of the Wadi Gaza wetlands along the main Salah al-Din Road. Huge numbers of displaced people from among Gaza’s 2.3 million population are already crammed into schools, hospitals and other sites in the south.
Thousands of others remain inside the encircled north, including at Gaza City’s main Al Shifa hospital, where Um Haitham Hejela was sheltering with her young children in an improvised tent.
“The situation is getting worse day after day,” she said. “There is no food, no water. When my son goes to pick up water, he queues for three or four hours in the line. They struck bakeries, we don’t have bread.”
Israel’s stated intention is to wipe out Hamas, pounding Gaza from air, land and sea while ground troops have moved in to cleave the narrow coastal strip in two in fierce urban fighting amid the ruins of buildings.
Palestinian media reported clashes between militants and Israeli forces near al-Shati (Beach) refugee camp in Gaza City. Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, said its fighters had destroyed an Israeli tank in Gaza City. Reuters
