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Friday, July 4, 2025

Israel widens evacuation orders as it shifts its offensive to southern Gaza amid heavy bombardments

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578 days ago
20231203
Palestinians mourn their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, in the hospital in Khan Younis, Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)

Palestinians mourn their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, in the hospital in Khan Younis, Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)

Is­rael’s mil­i­tary on Sun­day or­dered more ar­eas in and around Gaza’s sec­ond-largest city of Khan You­nis to evac­u­ate, as it shift­ed its of­fen­sive to the south­ern half of the ter­ri­to­ry where it says many Hamas lead­ers are hid­ing.

Heavy bom­bard­ments were re­port­ed overnight and in­to Sun­day in the area of Khan You­nis and the south­ern city of Rafah, as well as parts of the north that had been the fo­cus of Is­rael’s blis­ter­ing air and ground cam­paign.

The U.N. hu­man rights chief urged for an end to the war, say­ing the suf­fer­ing of civil­ians was “too much to bear.”

Many of the ter­ri­to­ry’s 2.3 mil­lion peo­ple are crammed in the south af­ter Is­raeli forces or­dered civil­ians to leave the north in the ear­ly days of the 2-month-old war, sparked by an Oct. 7 at­tack by Hamas and oth­er mil­i­tants that killed about 1,200 peo­ple, most­ly civil­ians, in south­ern Is­rael. Around 240 more were tak­en hostage.

With the re­sump­tion of fight­ing, hopes for an­oth­er tem­po­rary truce re­ced­ed. A week­long cease-fire, which ex­pired Fri­day, had fa­cil­i­tat­ed the re­lease of dozens of Gaza-held Is­raeli and for­eign hostages and Pales­tini­ans im­pris­oned by Is­rael.

“We will con­tin­ue the war un­til we achieve all its goals, and it’s im­pos­si­ble to achieve those goals with­out the ground op­er­a­tion,” Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Ne­tanyahu said Sat­ur­day.

Since the cease-fire col­lapsed, Hamas has fired scores of rock­ets in­to Is­rael. Most are in­ter­cept­ed or fall in open ar­eas. Over 200,000 Is­raelis have been evac­u­at­ed along the Gaza and Lebanon bor­ders due to rock­et fire.

On Sun­day, the Is­raeli mil­i­tary widened evac­u­a­tion or­ders in and around Khan You­nis, telling res­i­dents of at least five more ar­eas and neigh­bour­hoods to leave. Sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand Pales­tini­ans have re­ceived evac­u­a­tion or­ders since fight­ing re­sumed, but they have few places to go.

Res­i­dents said the Is­raeli mil­i­tary dropped leaflets or­der­ing them to move south to Rafah or to a coastal area in the south­west. “Khan You­nis city is a dan­ger­ous com­bat zone,” the leaflets read.

U.N. mon­i­tors said in a re­port is­sued be­fore the lat­est evac­u­a­tion or­ders that those who were told to leave make up about one-quar­ter of the ter­ri­to­ry of Gaza — home to near­ly 800,000 peo­ple be­fore the war. The Gaza Strip, bor­der­ing Is­rael and Egypt to the south, is sealed, leav­ing res­i­dents with the on­ly op­tion of mov­ing around with­in Gaza to avoid the bomb­ings.

“Si­lence the guns and re­turn to di­a­logue – the suf­fer­ing in­flict­ed on civil­ians is too much to bear. More vi­o­lence is not the an­swer. It will bring nei­ther peace nor se­cu­ri­ty,” U.N. High Com­mis­sion­er for Hu­man Rights Volk­er Türk said in a state­ment Sun­day.

He said those peo­ple in the north have been liv­ing in an “ap­palling sit­u­a­tion” and are forced to move “in what ap­pears to be an at­tempt to emp­ty north­ern Gaza of Pales­tini­ans.”

“Hun­dreds of thou­sands are be­ing con­fined in­to ever small­er ar­eas in south­ern Gaza with­out prop­er san­i­ta­tion, ac­cess to suf­fi­cient food, wa­ter and health sup­plies, even as bombs rain down around them,” Türk said. “I re­peat, there is no safe place in Gaza.”

“The time to change course is now. Those that choose to flout in­ter­na­tion­al law are on no­tice that ac­count­abil­i­ty will be served. No one is above the law,” he said.

Juli­ette Toma, di­rec­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the U.N. agency for Pales­tin­ian refugees, said there were near­ly 958,000 dis­placed peo­ple in 99 Unit­ed Na­tions fa­cil­i­ties in the south­ern Gaza Strip, in­clud­ing 34 in Khan You­nis.

The av­er­age num­ber of dis­placed peo­ple in U.N. shel­ters is 9,500, more than four times their usu­al ca­pac­i­ty, ac­cord­ing to the agency’s re­port on Nov. 30. The Unit­ed States, Is­rael’s clos­est al­ly, has warned Is­rael to avoid sig­nif­i­cant new mass dis­place­ment.

The main hos­pi­tal in Khan You­nis re­ceived at least three dead and dozens wound­ed Sun­day morn­ing from an Is­raeli strike that hit a res­i­den­tial build­ing in the east­ern part of the city, ac­cord­ing to an As­so­ci­at­ed Press jour­nal­ist at the hos­pi­tal.

Sep­a­rate­ly, the bod­ies of 31 peo­ple killed in Is­raeli bom­bard­ment across the cen­tral ar­eas of the strip were tak­en to the Al-Aqsa Mar­tyrs hos­pi­tal in Gaza’s cen­tral city of Deir al-Bal­ah, said Omar al-Darawi, an ad­min­is­tra­tive em­ploy­ee at that hos­pi­tal.

AP video showed bod­ies in white bags on the ground out­side the hos­pi­tal in De­ri al-Bal­ah as dozens of peo­ple held fu­ner­al prayers. One woman wept, cradling a child’s body on her lap as she sat on a chair. An­oth­er adult car­ried the body of a ba­by as he got in­to a truck tak­ing the re­mains for bur­ial.

The Is­raeli mil­i­tary said its fight­er jets and he­li­copters “struck ter­ror tar­gets in the Gaza Strip, in­clud­ing ter­ror tun­nel shafts, com­mand cen­tres and weapons stor­age fa­cil­i­ties” overnight, while a drone killed five Hamas fight­ers.

In north­ern Gaza, res­cue teams with lit­tle equip­ment scram­bled to dig through the rub­ble of build­ings in the Ja­baliya ur­ban refugee camp and oth­er neigh­bour­hoods in Gaza City in search for po­ten­tial sur­vivors and dead bod­ies.

“They strike every­where,” said Amal Rad­wan, a woman shel­ter­ing in Ja­baliya. “There is the non-stop sound of ex­plo­sions around us.”

Mo­hamed Abu Abed, who lives in Gaza City’s Sheikh Rad­wan neigh­bour­hood, al­so said there were re­lent­less airstrikes and shelling in his neigh­bour­hood and sur­round­ing ar­eas.

“The sit­u­a­tion here is unimag­in­able,” he said. “Death is every­where. One can die in a flash.”

The Health Min­istry in Hamas-ruled Gaza said Sat­ur­day that the over­all death toll in the strip since Oct. 7 had sur­passed 15,200, a sharp jump from the pre­vi­ous count of more than 13,300 on Nov. 20. The min­istry does not dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween civil­ian and com­bat­ant deaths, but said 70% of the dead were women and chil­dren. It said more than 40,000 peo­ple had been wound­ed.

U.S. ap­peals to pro­tect civil­ians came af­ter an of­fen­sive in the first weeks of the war dev­as­tat­ed large ar­eas of north­ern Gaza.

“Too many in­no­cent Pales­tini­ans have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civil­ian suf­fer­ing and the im­ages and videos com­ing from Gaza are dev­as­tat­ing,” U.S. Vice Pres­i­dent Ka­mala Har­ris told re­porters Sat­ur­day dur­ing the COP28 cli­mate con­fer­ence in Dubai.

Mark Regev, a se­nior ad­vis­er to Ne­tanyahu, said Is­rael was mak­ing “max­i­mum ef­fort” to pro­tect civil­ians and the mil­i­tary has used leaflets, phone calls, and ra­dio and TV broad­casts to urge Gazans to move from spe­cif­ic ar­eas. He added that Is­rael is con­sid­er­ing cre­at­ing a se­cu­ri­ty buffer zone that would not al­low Gazans di­rect ac­cess to the bor­der fence on foot.

Is­rael says it tar­gets Hamas op­er­a­tives and blames civil­ian ca­su­al­ties on the mil­i­tants, ac­cus­ing them of op­er­at­ing in res­i­den­tial neigh­bour­hoods. It claims to have killed thou­sands of mil­i­tants, with­out pro­vid­ing ev­i­dence. Is­rael says at least 78 of its sol­diers have been killed in the of­fen­sive in north­ern Gaza.

Mean­while, Har­ris told Egypt­ian Pres­i­dent Ab­del Fat­tah el-Sis­si in a meet­ing that “un­der no cir­cum­stances” would the U.S. per­mit the forced re­lo­ca­tion of Pales­tini­ans from Gaza or the West Bank, an on­go­ing siege of Gaza or the re­draw­ing of its bor­ders, ac­cord­ing to a U.S. sum­ma­ry.

The re­newed hos­til­i­ties have height­ened con­cerns for 137 hostages, who the Is­raeli mil­i­tary says are still be­ing held af­ter 105 were freed dur­ing the re­cent truce. Is­rael freed 240 Pales­tini­ans dur­ing the truce. Most of those re­leased by both sides were women and chil­dren.

The hostages’ plight has drawn wide­spread at­ten­tion and sym­pa­thy in Is­rael, and the gov­ern­ment is un­der pres­sure to ne­go­ti­ate ad­di­tion­al re­leas­es. The re­sump­tion of fight­ing ap­pears to have put those ef­forts on hold and raised fears for the re­main­ing hostages.

The fam­i­lies of hostages have called for an ur­gent meet­ing with Is­rael’s Se­cu­ri­ty Cab­i­net, say­ing time was “run­ning out to save those still held by Hamas.”

A group formed by fam­i­ly mem­bers of hostages said Sun­day the prime min­is­ter and Se­cu­ri­ty Cab­i­net had a “moral and eth­i­cal oblig­a­tion” to meet with the rel­a­tives. “Se­cu­ri­ty Cab­i­net mem­bers must pro­vide fam­i­lies an an­swer to the ques­tion: How do they plan to main­tain the supreme goal of the war – re­turn­ing the hostages alive. Now,” they said.

Magdy re­port­ed from Cairo and Be­ca­toros from Athens. As­so­ci­at­ed Press writer Tia Gold­en­berg in Tel Aviv, Is­rael con­tributed to this re­port.

KHAN YOU­NIS, Gaza Strip (AP) —

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