Beirut: Israel has issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to evacuate their homes and move closer to humanitarian aid, as it plans to launch a new attack on Hamas in south Gaza after raiding the north.
Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while speaking to MSNBC on Friday said that that Israel wants to avoid civilian casualties and urged people to relocate. “We don’t want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire,” he said.
Such a move could force hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli onslaught on Gaza City to move again, along with the residents of Khan Younis, a city of more than 400,000, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.
Israel has vowed to wipe out the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip after its Oct. 7 raid into Israel in which its fighters killed 1,200 people and dragged 240 hostages into the enclave.
Since then, Israel has reduced much of Gaza City to rubble, ordered the evacuation of the entire northern half of the narrow strip and left homeless around two-thirds of the enclave’s 2.3 million Palestinians. Many of those who have fled fear they will never return to their homes.
Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Friday to more than 12,000, 5,000 of them children. The United Nations considers those figures credible, though they are now updated infrequently due to the difficulty of collecting information.