Israeli forces advancing into the southern Gaza Strip’s main city pounded areas near the biggest hospital still functioning in the enclave on Thursday, sending patients and residents fleeing a battle they feared would lay the city to waste.
The heaviest battle of the year so far was under way in Khan Younis, sheltering hundreds of thousands of people who fled the north earlier in the war, now in its fourth month.
Residents described heavy fighting and intense bombardment in the north and east of the city and, for the first time, in the west, where they said tanks had advanced to carry out a raid before withdrawing. The Israeli military said a brigade in Khan Younis, now operating further south than troops had ventured before, had “eliminated dozens of terrorists in close-quarters combat and with the assistance of tank fire and air support”. It said it had killed 60 fighters in the previous 24 hours, including 40 in Khan Younis. The figures were impossible to verify.
The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which has doctors at the city’s Nasser Hospital, said patients and displaced people sheltering there were fleeing in panic.
In Rafah, further south, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are now crammed into a small city by the Egyptian border, 16 bodies were laid out on the bloodstained cobbles outside a morgue, most in white shrouds, a few in body bags.
More than three months into a war that has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the Gaza Strip to rubble, Israel has said it is planning to wind down its ground operations and shift to smaller-scale tactics.
But before doing so, it appears determined to capture all of Khan Younis, the main southern city which it says is now the principal base for the Hamas fighters who stormed across the border on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and seizing 240 hostages.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that, while Israel had already shifted to smaller scale operations in Gaza’s north, the fierce battle for Khan Younis was likely to rage on for up to two months.
Nearly all of Gaza’s population has now been penned into two small areas: Rafah just south of Khan Younis, and Deir al-Balah just north of it. Israel has given no indication of whether it intends to storm those towns but says it will not stop fighting until it has eradicated Hamas, an aim Palestinians say is unachievable given the group’s diffuse structure and deep roots. Reuters
