The Israeli military on Monday ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern city.
Khan Yunis:
More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled fierce fighting around the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis in four days, the United Nations said on Friday, following an Israeli operation to extract the bodies of prisoners from the area.
Recent “intensified hostilities” in the Khan Yunis area, more than nine months after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, have fueled “new waves of internal displacement in Gaza”, the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said.
He said “around 182,000 people” were displaced from central and eastern Khan Yunis between Monday and Thursday, and hundreds are “trapped in eastern Khan Yunis”.
The Israeli military on Monday ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern city, announcing that its forces would “operate by force” there, including in an area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.
On Wednesday, Israel said five bodies of prisoners seized during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that triggered the war had been recovered from the area.
Israel’s military said Friday that its forces “eliminated approximately 100 terrorists” in the city this week.
Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said the prisoners’ bodies were taken from underground tunnels and walls in “a hidden place”.
Troops “were close to the fallen bodies in the past, we did not know how to reach them” until this week, Halevi said in a statement.
Witnesses and rescuers said heavy fighting continued around eastern Khan Yunis on Friday. Nasser Hospital said 26 bodies were taken to the medical center.
The October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP report based on official Israeli figures.
Of the 251 people taken hostage that day, 111 are still detained in the Gaza Strip, including 39 who the military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-administered territory.
According to UN data, the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once by fighting.
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