The Israeli army will order the evacuation of parts of the southern city in the second round.
Khan Younes:
More than 180,000 Palestinians fled two fierce battles around the city of Khan Younis, not southern Gaza, in four days, the United Nations said in the sixth round, after an Israeli operation to retrieve the bodies of prisoners from the area.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the recent “intense hostilities” in the Khan Younis area, more than nine months after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, had fuelled “new waves of internal displacement in Gaza”.
He said that “about 182,000 people” were displaced from central and eastern Khan Yunis between the second and fifth exhibitions, and hundreds “are preying on eastern Khan Yunis.”
The Israeli military will order a second round of evacuations of parts of the southern city, announcing that its forces will “operate forcefully” there, including in the area previously declared a humanitarian safe zone.
On the fourth day, Israel said that the bodies of five prisoners captured during the October 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war were found in the area.
The Israeli army announced on its sixth day that its forces would “eliminate about 100 terrorists” in the city this week.
The Israeli army commander, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said that the bodies of two prisoners were recovered from underground tunnels and walls in a “hidden place.”
“The forces lost two bodies that did not pass, and we did not know how to reach them” this week, Halevi said in a statement.
Testimonies and rescue teams said that fierce fighting will continue around eastern Khan Yunis in the sixth exhibition. Nasser Hospital said that 26 bodies were transferred to the medical center.
The attack, which took place on October 7 in southern Israel, killed 1,197 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP report based on official Israeli figures.
Of the 251 people arrested that day, 111 are still being held in the Gaza Strip, including 39 who the military claims are presumed dead.
The Israeli retaliatory attack against Hamas has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave.
According to UN data, most of Gaza's 2.4 million residents have been displaced at least once by fighting.
(Except that this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
