More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled fierce fighting around the southern Gaza city of Khan Younes in four days, the United Nations said Friday, after an Israeli operation to extract captives’ bodies from the area.
Recent “intensified hostilities” in the Khan Younes area, more than nine months into the Israel-Hamas war, have fueled “new waves of internal displacement across Gaza”, said the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA.
It said that “about 182,000 people” have been displaced from central and eastern Khan Younes between Monday and Thursday, while “hundreds of other people remain stranded in eastern Khan Younes”.
The Israeli military on Monday issued evacuation orders for parts of the southern city, announcing its forces would “forcefully operate” there, including in an area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.
On Wednesday, Israel said five bodies of captives seized during Hamas’s October 7 attack that triggered the war had been recovered from the area.
Since the latest fighting began in Khan Younes this week, Israel’s military said on Friday that its forces had “eliminated approximately 100 terrorists” in the city.
Israel’s military Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said the captives’ bodies were pulled from underground tunnels and walls in “a hidden place”.
Troops “were near those fallen bodies in the past, we did not know how to reach them” until this week, Halevi said in a statement issued by the military.
Witnesses and rescuers said heavy battles continued on Friday around eastern Khan Younes, where the civil defense agency said shelling killed at least two people in a house.
With AFP
