The Age / Reuters | Nidal al-Mughrabi and James Mackenzie | November 18, 2023
Gaza/Jerusalem: Israel issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate west out of the line of fire and closer to humanitarian aid, in the latest indication that it plans to attack Hamas in southern Gaza after subduing the north.
“We’re asking people to relocate. I know it’s not easy for many of them, but we don’t want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire,” Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC.
Such a move could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to relocate again, along with residents of Khan Younis, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.
Khan Younis has a population of more than 400,000.
Israel vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip following an October 7 rampage into Israel in which it killed 1200 people and dragged 240 hostages into the enclave.
Since then, Israel has bombed much of Gaza City to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the entire northern half of the enclave and left homeless around two-thirds of the strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians.
Many of those who have fled fear their displacement could become permanent.
Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Friday to more than 12,000 people, 5000 of them children. The United Nations deems those figures credible, though they are now updated infrequently due to the difficulty of collecting information.
Khan Younis
Israel again dropped leaflets over eastern areas of Khan Younis telling people to evacuate to shelters, suggesting that military operations there are imminent.
Regev said that Israeli troops would have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters from underground tunnels and bunkers, but that no such “enormous infrastructure” exists in less built-up areas to the west.
“I’m pretty sure that they won’t have to move again” if they move west, he continued. “We’re asking them to move to an area where hopefully there will be tents and a field hospital.”
Because the western areas are closer to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, humanitarian aid could be brought in “as quickly as possible,” he said.
With the war entering its seventh week, there was no sign of any let-up despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least for humanitarian pauses.
“We are determined to advance our operation,” said Israel’s chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
“It will happen wherever Hamas exists, including in the south of the [Gaza] Strip.”
Abu Ubaida, Hamas armed wing spokesman, said in a video statement: “We have prepared ourselves for a long and sustained defence from all directions. The more time the occupation’s forces stay in Gaza, the heavier their continuous losses.”
Quoting the Palestinian news agency WAFA, Reuters reported that about 26 Palestinians, mostly children, were killed in an Israeli bombardment of Khan Younis on Saturday.
The area was also targeted by airstrikes on Thursday and Friday. Mohammed Zaqout, the head of Gaza’s hospitals, said a total of 35 people were killed in airstrikes in Khan Younis and the nearby town of Rafah overnight.
Fresh violence flared in the occupied West Bank, with at least five Palestinians killed and two injured in an Israeli strike on a building in the Balata refugee camp in the central city of Nablus, the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said early on Saturday.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Fuel deliveries
Amid warnings that its siege would cause starvation and disease, Israel appeared to bow to international pressure, agreeing to allow fuel trucks into Gaza and promising “no limitation” on aid requested by the UN.
Israel said it would allow two truckloads of fuel a day at the request of Washington to help the UN meet basic needs and to allow sewerage system to operate and hence avoid “epidemics”, and spoke of plans to increase aid more broadly.
“We will increase the capacity of the humanitarian convoys and trucks as long as there is a need,” Colonel Elad Goren, from COGAT, the Ministry of Defence agency that coordinates administrative issues with the Palestinians, told a briefing.
While Israel has promised to allow in aid in the past, the remarks appeared to signal a shift in tone after UN agencies warned that humanitarian conditions in Gaza were rapidly deteriorating, including a stark warning from the World Food Program of the “immediate possibility of starvation”.
The White House said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that it was “glad” that Israel had agreed to the fuel deliveries and that they should “continue on a regular basis and in larger quantities.”
Meanwhile, Al Shifa Hospital staff said a premature baby died at the hospital on Friday, the first baby to die there since Israeli forces entered. Three had died in the previous days while the hospital was surrounded.
Hamas also announced the death of a second captive from Israel, an 85-year-old it said died of a panic attack during an airstrike.
In Modiin, Israel, family held a funeral for Noa Marciano, 19, an Israeli army conscript whose body was recovered from Gaza City near Shifa on Thursday. She had been abducted from a military base during the October 7 Hamas attack.
A day earlier Israel recovered the body of Yehudit Weiss, 65, a mother of five who was seized from Kibbutz Be’eri.
Russian news agencies quoted Russia’s Emergencies Ministry as saying 170 Russian citizens on Friday crossed from Gaza into Egypt, part of a group of some 200 people who made their way out.