New refugee surge in Gaza as tanks advance

Cairo/Gaza — Tens of thousands of homeless Palestinian families took flight again in central Gaza on Thursday, where advancing Israeli forces pounded areas teeming with people who fled the north.

Further south, Israeli forces struck the area around a hospital in the heart of Khan Younis, the Gaza Strip’s main southern city. People there fear a new ground push into territory crowded with families made homeless in 12 weeks of war.

Israel stepped up its ground war in Gaza sharply just before Christmas despite public pleas from its closest ally the US to scale the campaign down in the closing weeks of the year.

The main focus of fighting is now in central areas south of the wetlands that bisect the Strip, where Israeli forces ordered civilians out as their tanks advance.

Tens of thousands of people fleeing the big Nusseirat, Bureij and Maghazi districts of central Gaza were moving south or west on Thursday into the already overwhelmed city of Deir al-Balah on the Mediterranean coast, crowding into camps of makeshift tents.

More than 150,000 people, “young children, women carrying babies, people with disabilities and the elderly, have nowhere to go”, the main UN organisation operating in Gaza, UNRWA, said in a social media post. It decried “forced displacement” under Israeli evacuation orders.

Palestinian residents and fighters said there was heavy fighting in the eastern part of Bureij on Thursday morning, with Israeli tanks pushing in from the north and east.

“That moment has come. I wished it would never happen, but it seems displacement is a must,” said Omar, 60. He said he was forced to move with at least 35 family members.

“We are now in a tent in Deir al-Balah because of this brutal Israeli war,” he told Reuters by phone, declining to give a second name. “Israel is killing doctors, social media influencers, journalists, and civilians,” he said.

Yamen Hamad, living in a school in Deir al-Balah since fleeing the north, said the new refugees from Bureij and Nusseirat were setting up tents. Some fled areas when Israel told them to go. Others came without waiting to be told.

With food running out, he said he had made a dangerous trip to Rafah near the Egyptian border to buy a 25kg sack of flour for his family.

Fighting near hospital in Khan Younis

Khan Younis, the main southern city where Israeli forces advanced this month after a truce collapse, came under heavy bombardment on Thursday morning from warplanes and tanks near the al-Amal hospital, west of Israeli positions.

The Palestinian Red Crescent, which runs the hospital and has its headquarters nearby, said 10 Palestinians were killed and 12 wounded in one bombardment there, the third strike in the area around the hospital in less than an hour.

Residents said they believed Israeli forces were trying to provoke a new flight before another assault on the city. Al-Amal is near the Nasser Hospital, the main hospital in Khan Younis and the largest still functioning in the enclave.

Palestinian officials reported 50 people killed in strikes in Khan Younis and in the central area. Israel reported three more of its soldiers killed in fighting in central and southern areas, bringing its toll in the ground campaign to 169. The past week has seen some of its heaviest losses of the war so far.

Israel says it will not halt its ground campaign in Gaza until it annihilates the Hamas movement, which controls the enclave. The war erupted when Hamas militants crossed the border and killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages on a rampage through Israeli towns on October 7.

Israel’s assault has laid much of the enclave to waste. Palestinian officials say more than 21,000 people, nearly 1% of Gaza’s 2.3-million population, are confirmed killed and thousands more are feared dead and lost in the ruins.

Virtually all residents have been driven from their homes at least once and many forced to flee repeatedly. Only a handful of hospitals still function.

Palestinians say wiping out Hamas, which has been sworn to Israel's destruction for decades, is an unachievable aim, given the militant group's diffuse structure and deep roots in a territory it has ruled since 2007.

Israel says that since October 7, the deadliest day in its history, it has no choice but war to safeguard its security and return more than 100 hostages still believed held by militants. It claims to have killed 8,000 fighters so far.

But its Western allies worry that the civilian casualties will radicalise a new generation of Palestinians and spread fighting to other parts of the Middle East. This week, Iran-backed groups attacked US forces in Iraq and commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

US President Joe Biden warned this month that “indiscriminate bombing” jeopardised sympathy for Israel among its allies. Washington said Israel should make a transition from full-scale ground war to a targeted campaign against Hamas leaders.

European countries backing Israel’s right to self-defence have been calling for a sustainable ceasefire, a position French President Emmanuel Macron took on a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday.

Since the Gaza war began, fighting has escalated on Israel’s border with Lebanon and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the UN reported on Thursday that human rights for Palestinians had deteriorated sharply.

Reuters