The ground forces of Israel They are advancing towards southern Gaza after three days of intense bombardment.
The first reports from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) radio confirmed that they have launched a ground operation north of Khan Younis.
Images verified by the BBC show an Israeli tank operating near the city.
IDF chief Herzi Halevi later told his soldiers that the army is fighting “strongly and intensely” in southern Gaza.
Column of smoke in the city of Khan Younis after the Israeli incursion. (GETTY IMAGES).
Evacuations and ground raid
Lieutenant General Halevi informed the Gaza division reservists of the military targets and the killing of Hamas commanders by the IDF.
“We fought hard and intensely in the northern Gaza Strip, and now we are also doing it in the south“he told the soldiers.
An IDF spokesman later confirmed that Israel “continues to expand the ground incursion” throughout Gaza, in which its soldiers “carry out hand to hand battles with terrorists”.
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As the week-long truce ended on Friday, Israel resumed a large-scale bombing campaign in Gaza, which residents of Khan Younis have described as the most intense wave of attacks yet.
During the seven-day ceasefire, Hamas returned 110 hostages held in Gaza in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners serving sentences in Israeli jails.
On Sunday morning the Israeli army issued evacuation orders in several districts of Khan Yunisurging the population to abandon them immediately.
Israeli authorities believe Hamas leaders are hiding in the city, which has become a refuge for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing fighting in the north in the early stages of the war.
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Palestinians prepare to leave Khan Yunis following Israel’s evacuation order. (GETTY IMAGES).
“Panic” in a hospital
A UN official described a “level of panic” he had never seen before in a Gaza hospital, after the Israeli army shifted the focus of its offensive to the south.
James Elder of the UN children’s agency Unicef described the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis as a “war zone“.
An adviser to Israel’s prime minister said the country is making “every effort” to avoid killing civilians.
Elder, for his part, told the BBC that he could hear large and constant explosions near the Nasser hospital and that the children arrived with head injuriessevere burns and embedded shrapnel from recent explosions.
“It’s a hospital I’ve been to regularly and the kids now know me; the families know me. Those same people grab my hand or my shirt and say, ‘Please take us somewhere safe. Where is it safe?’ ‘”.
“Unfortunately the only answer to that question is that there is no safe place. Not even, as you know, that hospital,” she lamented.
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Displaced Palestinians take refuge in the Nasser hospital. (GETTY IMAGES).
Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry estimates that more than 500 people have been killed since shelling resumed, and more than 15,500 since the start of the war.
Mohammed Ghalayini, a British-Palestinian who remains in Gaza, described the situation in the territory as “beyond catastrophic.”
“People have been enduring the brutal Israeli attack for 50 days or more and have very few resources such as food, water, energy and sanitation and waste management services,” he told the BBC by phone, before the connection was cut. .
The environmental pollution expert, who normally lives in Manchester, arrived in Gaza on what was intended to be a three-month visit to see his mother shortly before the attacks. October 7.
1.8 million displaced
Israel began its retaliatory bombings against Gaza following Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7, in which Islamist militants killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostage.
Since fighting resumed on Friday, rockets have also been fired at Israel from Gaza on a regular basis. A 22-year-old man from the city of Holon, near Tel Aviv, was treated on Saturday for minor shrapnel wounds.
Hundreds of thousands of people have already fled the fighting to take refuge in Khan Younis after Israel told them to leave the northern Strip.
The latest update from the UN indicates that around 1.8 million people are displaced internally in Gaza.
Speaking to the BBC, UN human rights chief Filippo Grandi said Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being “increasingly pushed towards a narrow corner of what is already a very narrow territory”.
The IDF has begun publishing maps of the areas to attack on the Internet. They say these maps, along with other measures such as phone calls and leaflets dropped by plane over Gaza, will warn people to evacuate.
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday program “Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top adviser, Mark Regev, alleged that civilians are not targets and that protecting them is made more difficult because Hamas “embeds its military terror machine “in residential neighborhoods.
He asserted that the IDF is trying to be “as surgical as it can in a very difficult combat situation” and warn of attacks in advance.
The IDF claims to have destroyed 500 excavations of “terrorist tunnels” used by Hamas in Gaza of the 800 they say they have located so far.
Regev also noted that since the war began, Israel’s air force has carried out some 10,000 airstrikes against “terrorist targets” under the direction of IDF soldiers on the ground.
