Israel said on Tuesday its troops had entered Gaza’s second-largest city as intense shelling sent ambulances and cars rushing to hospitals with wounded and dead Palestinians, including children, in a bloody new phase of the war.
The army said its forces were “in the heart” of Khan Younis, which has become the first target of the expanded ground offensive into southern Gaza that Israel says is aimed at destroying Hamas.
Military officials said they were engaging in the “most intense day” of battles since the ground offensive began more than five weeks ago, with heavy gunfire also taking place in northern Gaza.
The attack on the south threatens to fuel a new wave of displaced Palestinians and a worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
The UN said 1.87 million people – more than 80% of Gaza’s population – have been driven from their homes and fighting is now preventing the distribution of food, water and medicine outside a small strip of southern Gaza. .
A photograph taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on December 6, 2023, shows a Black Hawk military transport helicopter flying near the border with the Palestinian territory on December 6, 2023. AFP via Getty Images
New military evacuation orders are squeezing people into smaller and smaller areas of the south.
Shelling has become more ferocious across the territory, including areas where Palestinians are told to seek safety. In the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, just north of Khan Younis, an attack on Tuesday destroyed a house where dozens of displaced people were sheltering.
At least 34 people died, including at least six children, according to an Associated Press journalist at the hospital who counted the bodies.
A photograph taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on December 6, 2023, shows smoke billowing during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza amid continuing battles between Israel and Hamas. AFP via Getty Images A Palestinian woman stands in a destroyed room in a building as she inspects the site of Israeli strikes in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, December 6, 2023. REUTERS
Footage from the scene showed women screaming from the top floor of a house smashed by a concrete shell. Among the rubble, the men pulled the limp body of a child from under a slab next to a burning car.
At the nearby hospital, doctors tried to revive a boy and girl, bloodied and motionless on a stretcher.
Israel’s attack in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack has killed more than 16,200 people in Gaza (70% of them women and children) and injured more than 42,000, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. which released new figures on Tuesday evening.
Palestinians inspect the site of Israeli attacks in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, December 6, 2023. REUTERS
The ministry does not differentiate between deaths of civilians and combatants.
It says hundreds of people have been killed or injured since a week-long ceasefire ended on Friday, and many are still trapped under the rubble.
Israel says it must remove Hamas from power to prevent a repeat of the attack that sparked the war, when Hamas and other terrorists killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took captive about 240 men, women and children.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the military would have to maintain indefinite security control over the Gaza Strip long after the war ends.
A Palestinian boy injured in an Israeli airstrike receives treatment at the Nasser Medical Hospital on December 6, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza. fake images
His comments suggested a renewed direct Israeli occupation of Gaza, something the United States says it opposes.
Netanyahu said only the Israeli military can ensure that Gaza remains demilitarized. “No international force can be responsible for this,” he said at a news conference. “I am not willing to close my eyes and accept any other agreement.”
Under pressure from the United States to prevent further mass casualties, Israel says it is being more precise as it expands its offensive and is taking additional steps to urge civilians to evacuate out of its way.
Weeks of bombing and a ground offensive devastated much of northern Gaza.
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The military accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields when terrorists operate in densely populated residential areas.
But Israel has not accounted for the targets of individual attacks, some of which have leveled entire city blocks and complexes of dozens of multi-story apartment towers.
Military Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi acknowledged that Israeli forces use intense force against civilian structures and said terrorists keep weapons in homes and buildings so plainclothes fighters can use them to fire on troops.
“Attacking them requires significant use of fire, both to attack the enemy and, of course, to protect our forces,” he said. “Therefore, the forces act powerfully.”
BATTLES IN KHAN YOUNIS AND NORTHERN GAZA
Halevi said his forces had begun the “third phase of ground operations,” advancing against Hamas in the south after seizing much of the north. Israel has not given specific details about troop movements.
Residents said troops advanced toward Bani Suheila, on the eastern edge of Khan Younis.
Israeli forces also appear to be moving to partially cut the strip between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.
A Palestinian gestures as he inspects the site of Israeli strikes in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, December 6, 2023. REUTERS
Satellite photos from Sunday showed around 150 Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles on the main road between the two cities.
The past few days have seen some of the heaviest shelling of the entire war, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, said.
Witnesses said an attack on Tuesday hit a school in Khan Younis where hundreds of displaced people were sheltering.
Smoke rises over Gaza seen from southern Israel December 6, 2023. REUTERS
Casualties overwhelmed the nearby Nasser Hospital, where wounded men and children lay on a bloody floor amid a tangle of intravenous tubes. In the morgue, a woman lay on the stretcher where her husband and her son lay dead among at least nine corpses.
“What is happening here is unimaginable,” said Hamza al-Bursh, who lives near the school. “They attack indiscriminately.”
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In northern Gaza, the army said its troops were fighting Hamas militants in the Jabaliya refugee camp and the Shujaiya district, capturing Hamas positions and destroying rocket launchers and underground infrastructure.
The battles in the north signaled stiff resistance from Hamas since Israeli forces entered on October 27.
The military says 86 of its soldiers have been killed in the Gaza offensive and that thousands of Hamas fighters have been killed, although it has not provided evidence.
Even after weeks of bombing, Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yehya Sinwar, whose location is unknown, was able to carry out complex ceasefire negotiations and orchestrate the release of more than 100 Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for 240 prisoners. Palestinians last week. .
Palestinian militants have also continued to fire rockets at Israel.
FEWER PLACES TO GO
Following the large-scale evacuation of northern Gaza ordered by Israel at the start of the war, most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million is squeezed into the 90 square kilometers of central and southern Gaza. .
Since advancing south, the Israeli military has ordered people to leave nearly two dozen neighborhoods in and around Khan Younis.
A displaced Palestinian family who fled Khan Yunis sets up camp in Rafah, further south, near the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, on December 6, 2023. AFP via Getty Images
That further reduced by more than a quarter the area where civilians can seek shelter.
It was unclear how many people followed the evacuation call.
“Nowhere is safe in Gaza and there is nowhere left to go,” Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said Monday. “The conditions necessary to deliver aid to the people of Gaza do not exist. If possible, an even more hellish scenario is about to unfold.”
People react as injured Palestinians are taken to Nasser hospital, following Israeli attacks on the Ma’an school east of Khan Younis in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, December 5, 2023. REUTERS
For the past two days, the distribution of aid – mainly supplies of flour and water – has only been possible in the town of Rafah, at the southern end of the border, the UN said.
Deeper locations inside Gaza, including Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and northern Gaza, could not be reached due to fighting.
Dr Nasser Bolbol, head of neonatal intensive care at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, said acute hunger was spreading, with some children dying from dehydration and malnutrition, after almost two months with only limited help coming in. to the territory, under an Israeli government. seal.
“Gaza is completely covered in death and darkness,” he said.
A woman mourns the death of her son and her husband in an Israeli army bombing in the Gaza Strip, at the Khan Younis hospital, on December 5, 2023. AP
STILL HOSTAGE
Relatives of hostages still detained in Gaza held tense talks with Netanyahu and the war cabinet on Tuesday.
Observers present said more than 100 people attended the nearly three-hour meeting.
Some family members shouted at the cabinet members, sensing that they had no immediate plan to rescue some 138 hostages who were still captive.
Almost half the room left disappointed before the meeting was over.
During the meeting, five hostages freed during the truce shared harrowing details of their experience.
One spoke of Hamas fighters “touching” female hostages, and another said militants shaved a hostage’s body hair to humiliate him, according to a group representing the hostages’ families.
Others said they had been deprived of water.
A doctor who treated some of the 110 freed hostages separately told the AP that at least 10 women and men among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused, but did not provide further details. He spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the identities of the hostages.
Noam Peri, whose 80-year-old father remains captive, said the meeting with Netanyahu and the war cabinet was not a relaxed discussion.
“After 60 days, people are tired and worried,” Peri said.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn