Israel bombards Gaza; Palestinians running out of land to shelter
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Khan Younis/Gaza Strip: In the Gaza Strip, Israel is pushing forward with offensive and invasion, forcing the Palestinians to evacuate, but the crisis is that the latter have run out of space to go, reports PTI.
Israel bombarded an area in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday, and the military is ordering mass evacuations while Palestinians' territory is progressively shrinking.
The expanded assault posed a deadly choice for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians - either stay in the path of Israeli forces or flee within the confines of southern Gaza with no guarantee of safety. Aid workers warned that the mass movement would worsen the already dire humanitarian catastrophe in the territory.
"Another wave of displacement is underway, and the humanitarian situation worsens by the hour," the Gaza chief of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Thomas White, said in a post on X.
Adding to the chaos, phone and internet networks across Gaza collapsed again Monday evening, the Palestinian telecom provider PalTel reported. The network has broken down multiple times during the war, making it largely impossible for residents to communicate with each other or the outside world for hours or sometimes several days until it is repaired.
Israel has vowed to eliminate Gaza's Hamas rulers, whose October 7 attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of the territory's population of 2.3 million people. Palestinian health officials say bombardment has killed several hundred civilians since a week-long truce ended Friday.
Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas — if that's possible, given the group's deep roots in Palestinian society — before any new cease-fire. But the mounting toll is likely to further increase international pressure to return to the negotiating table.
Airstrikes and the ground offensive in northern Gaza have reduced large swaths of Gaza City and nearby areas to a rubble-filled wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled south during the assault.
Currently around 2 million people — most of the territory's population — are crowded into the 230 square kilometers (90 square miles) of southern and central Gaza, where Israel's ground offensive is now moving, threatening to render even larger areas uninhabitable.
Since the truce's collapse, the military has ordered the population out of an area of about 62 square kilometres (24 square miles) in and near Khan Younis, according to the evacuation maps issued by the Israeli military. That further reduces the space available for Palestinians by more than a quarter.
- Inputs from PTI
