Israeli forces battled Hamas militants in Gaza’s main southern city on Wednesday in some of the most intense combat of the two-month-old war sparked by the October 7 attacks.
The focus of the conflict has shifted into the besieged territory’s south following fierce fighting and bombardment that reduced much of the north to rubble and forced 1.9 million people to flee.
Israeli troops, tanks, armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers have rolled into Khan Yunis in the south, Gaza’s second biggest city, forcing already displaced civilians to pack up and flee again, witnesses told AFP.
“Our forces are now encircling the Khan Yunis area in the southern Gaza Strip,” Israel’s army chief Herzi Halevi said Tuesday.
“We have secured many Hamas strongholds in the northern Gaza Strip, and now we are operating against its strongholds in the south.”
The fighting was “the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation” in late October, said the army’s Southern Command chief Major General Yaron Finkelman.
The streets of Khan Yunis were almost empty on Wednesday morning as residents tried to take shelter from shelling and artillery fire, said AFP journalists, while the dead and wounded continued to pour into the city’s hospitals.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the militant group’s October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities, and saw around 240 hostages taken.
The latest toll from the Hamas-run government media office said 16,248 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, had been killed.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and free 138 hostages still held after scores were released during a short-lived truce.
In a morning briefing the army said it had struck about 250 targets in the Gaza Strip over the past day and that troops were “continuing to locate weapons, underground shafts, explosives and additional military infrastructure”.
The civilian mass casualties in Gaza have sparked global concern, heightened by dire shortages brought by an Israeli siege that has seen only limited supplies of food, water, fuel and medicines enter.
Hassan Al-Qadi, a displaced Khan Yunis resident, said “the whole city is suffering from destruction and relentless shelling.
“Many people arriving from northern Gaza are facing dire circumstances. Many are homeless and some are searching for their missing children.”
“We are not mere numbers. We are human beings,” he said, speaking in the southern city of Rafah.
The violence in Gaza “now ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age”, charged aid group the Norwegian Refugee Council, which also warned of the dire public health threat of the approaching winter.
