The Israeli army launched new attacks this Wednesday on the besieged town of Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, where residents are trying to shelter from the bombings and the most intense fighting.
The Palestinians of Gaza are living in “total horror”, declared the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, fearing “atrocities” caused by the attack by the Palestinian movement Hamas two months after the start of the war on Israel, on September 7. September October.
The streets of Khan Younes, where ground troops are also involved, were virtually empty today as the dead and wounded continued to be taken to hospitals, AFP journalists on the scene said.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians are in the city and surrounding areas, many of whom have been expelled from other parts of the enclave since the start of the war. They are facing a catastrophic humanitarian situation and are confined to an area increasingly closer to the border with Egypt.
Thousands of people continue to flee south to the neighboring city of Rafah on foot, in carts or with luggage piled on the roofs of cars.
“The whole city is destroyed and bombed. Many people come from the north in disastrous conditions, without shelter, looking for their children,” Hassan Al-Qadi, a resident of Khan Younes who just arrived in Rafah, told AFP.
“We want to understand. If they want to kill us, let them surround us in one place and eliminate us all. But pushing us from one place to another is not fair. We are not just numbers. We are people” , he added.
Fadi Al-Ashi, a resident of Gaza city, in the north of the territory, arrived in Rafah after a long walk.
“We stayed in eight or nine houses before we got here,” said the same man, who traveled to Rafah on foot “because there were no cars or other means of transportation.”
Committed to a ground offensive against Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip since October 27, in parallel with the offensive campaign, the Israeli army expanded ground operations to the entire territory and announced on Tuesday that it had surrounded Khan Younes.
According to the Hamas Health Ministry, 16,248 people, 70% of whom are women, children and teenagers, have been killed by Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip since October 7.
In Israel, the attack carried out that day by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to authorities.
“We have taken over many Hamas strongholds in the north of the Gaza Strip and are now conducting operations against strongholds in the south,” Army Chief of Staff General Herzi Halevi said on Tuesday.
“Our forces find weapons in almost every building and house, and terrorists in many houses, and confront them,” he added.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad sources told AFP that their fighters clashed with Israeli forces in an attempt to prevent the army from entering Khan Younes and areas east of the city, as well as nearby refugee camps.
According to the Hamas government, artillery fire caused “dozens of deaths and injuries” in several villages east of Khan Younes on Tuesday evening.
Today the Israeli army demanded that the International Committee of the Red Cross be given access to the 138 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
“The Israeli army will do everything in its power to rescue our hostages (…) We call on others to do the same,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari said.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Rafah is currently the only place in the area – completely under siege by Israel since October 9 – where humanitarian aid is still being distributed, albeit in large quantities.
In Khan Younes, aid is virtually non-existent and access to the northernmost areas has been cut off since the resumption of fighting.
Every day the army drops leaflets on Khan Younes, warning of impending bombings and ordering residents to leave the neighborhoods.
The UN, which calculated that 28% of the Gaza Strip is currently under these withdrawal orders, deemed it “impossible” to create safe zones for civilians.
“Nowhere is safe in Gaza. Not the hospitals, not the shelters, not the refugee camps. No one is safe. Not the children. Not the healthcare workers. Not the humanitarian aid workers. This blatant disregard for the basic principles of humanity has ended,” said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.
The same scenes of chaos are repeated every day at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, the largest in the south of the Gaza Strip, as well as in the city’s other hospitals.
Source: DN
