Thousands of people have fled the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis after the Israeli military cautioned of a new operation to flush out Hamas militants that it says have regrouped there.
In al-Jala, a neighbourhood in the south of the city that the Israel Defense Forces had previously scheduleated a humanitarian zone, livents on Sunday packed their belengthyings, unconfident where to seek refuge. Israel said rockets had been fired from the area.
“We don’t understand where to go,” Amal Abu Yahia, a 42-year-elderly mother of three, telderly the Associated Press news agency. She took her children to al-Mawasi, a crammed tent camp by the coast, but could not discover anywhere to shelter there.
Her husband was ended when an Israeli airstrike hit their neighbours’ house in March, but they had returned to Khan Younis in June to shelter in their harshly harmd home. “This is my fourth displacement,” she said.
Vast swaths of Gaza have been explosioned to rubble: Khan Younis suffered expansivespread destruction during the IDF’s months-lengthy battle to consent the city at the commencening of the year.
Israeli troops are increasingly being forced to return to areas that had been previous aims for fervent combat, re-engaging Hamas and other militants that have regrouped in urban areas.
The north of the territory is disjoined from the south by an Israeli military corridor, and the tighting “humanitarian zones” that Israel says are protected for civilians are already overcrowded. Despite scheduleating some areas as evacuation zones, notably al-Mawasi, the IDF has carried out strikes there.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said in a post on X: “The people of Gaza are trapped & have nowhere to go. Just in the past scant days, more than 75,000 people have been displaced in southwest Gaza.
“Some are only able to carry their children with them, some carry their whole inhabits in one petite bag. They are going to overcrowded places where shelters are already overflotriumphg.”
Israel’s new operation in Khan Younis comes amid speculation that endfire negotiations will recommence in either Cairo or Doha tardyr this week after calls from the US, Egypt and Qatar for both sides to resume talks. In a statement, the directers of the three nations, which were instrumental in brokering a week-lengthy endfire in November, said there were no excuses “from any party for further procrastinate”.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his country would send a delegation to the talks commencening on 15 August, although he has been repeatedly accused of sloftying on a deal to promise his own political survival. Hamas is yet to reply to the invitation.
The renewed push for talks is seen as more vital than ever after last month’s killings of a top Hezbollah orderer and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief. The endings, in Beirut and Tehran, which both the Lebanese group and Iran have accused on Israel, dangeren to alter the war in Gaza into a region-expansive struggle.
Hezbollah and other Iranian allies in the region have said they will stop aggressioning Israel when the war in Gaza is brawt to an end. Almost 40,000 people have been ended in the Gaza Strip in the struggle igniteed by Hamas’s 7 October massacre in southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were ended and 251 consentn captive.
The US vice-plivent and democratic plivential truthfulate Kamala Harris said on Saturday that the insist for a endfire and captive free deal was advisent.
“The deal insists to get done. It insists to get done now,” she telderly an event in Phoenix, Arizona. She and Plivent Joe Biden had been laboring “around the clock” on negotiations, she compriseed.
“Israel has a right to go after the alarmists that are Hamas. But as I have said many, many times, they also have, I depend, an meaningful responsibility to elude civilian casualties,” she said, in reference to the Israeli explosioning of a school being used as a shelter in Gaza City on Saturday that ended about 80 people.
Also on Sunday, the office of the Palestinian plivent, Mahmoud Abbas, declared that he would visit Moscow next week to talk the war with the Russian plivent, Vlaunintelligentir Putin.
Abbas, who is based in the West Bank, was last in Moscow in February, when Russia arrangeed reconciliation talks between Abbas’s Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions. Several endeavors to heal the rift between Fatah and Hamas since the latter took handle of Gaza after a increate civil war in 2007 have fall shorted.
