Israeli forces near major city in southern Gaza as civilians panic

Israel widened its military assault against Hamas in the southern part of the Gaza Strip on Monday, with armored vehicles rolling closer to its main city and strikes pummeling urban areas, where images showed smoke rising from flattened buildings and people carrying bodies swaddled in blankets.

Satellite imagery analyzed by The New York Times showed that the Israeli military had pushed into southern Gaza between Friday and Sunday, soon after the collapse of its weeklong truce with Hamas. As of Sunday, dozens of armored vehicles had moved into the area, according to the satellite images, which also showed tracks and clearings, likely from bulldozers.

The strikes came as the Israeli military again warned civilians to leave parts of Khan Younis, southern Gaza’s largest city, and to move to places farther south, including Rafah, on the Egyptian border. The evacuation order echoed similar directives that Israel gave before sending troops into northern Gaza in late October.

The Israeli military has not confirmed a ground invasion of the south, although it has been signaling one for days and warning civilians in several areas to evacuate. On Monday, the chief military spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said that Israeli forces “keep expanding the ground operation to tackle Hamas strongholds all across the Gaza Strip.”

“Our forces are determined to do that wherever we’re required,” he said, citing two Gaza City neighborhoods in particular: Shajaiya and Jabalia, a densely populated refugee area, where Israeli warplanes dropped 2,000-pound bombs in late October, killing dozens of civilians and wounding hundreds, according to hospital officials.

Hamas’ military wing said that its fighters had targeted a tank and a personnel carrier north of Khan Younis and several Israeli military vehicles in central Gaza. The claims from both sides could not be immediately verified.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled to southern Gaza since the start of the war on Oct. 7. Now, packed into shelters lacking basic supplies, many say they feel trapped.

Lubna al-Rayess, a 42-year-old school principal who is eight months pregnant, said on Monday that she had moved twice in less than two months, first to another neighborhood in Gaza City and then to Khan Younis. Now, she said, she was unsure whether to move again to Rafah, where she said her sister had told her about heavy strikes.

“Where will we go now?” al-Rayess said in a phone interview. “We have nowhere else to go.”

On Monday, a spokesperson for the Israeli military posted a map directing civilians to move to areas southeast of Khan Younis and to Rafah. But both places “are already overcrowded,” according to the United Nations’ humanitarian office, and further strikes were reported in the Rafah area early Monday, according to Palestinian news outlets.

Al-Rayess said the strikes around her in Khan Younis had been “nonstop” since the truce between Israel and Hamas ended on Friday. The thought of fleeing again was unbearable, she said, but leaflets dropped on the city, including on Monday, instructed civilians in several areas adjacent to hers to evacuate.

After more than a month of fighting concentrated in northern Gaza, Israel has said it remains determined to eliminate Hamas, which killed an estimated 1,200 people in a cross-border attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7.

While the Israeli military says it is making progress toward that goal, it has come at a heavy cost for Palestinian civilians.

More than 15,000 people have been killed since Israeli forces began their retaliatory strikes, according to Gaza health officials. And the war has displaced nearly 80% of Gaza’s residents, or about 1.8 million people, according to the United Nations.

In Deir Al-Balah, in the central part of the Gaza Strip, Rajaa Nassar said Monday that she was sheltering with 40 family members near Salah al-Din Street, Gaza’s main north-south road, and had heard the sound of shelling “very close by.”

“There’s no way to get to Khan Younis and Rafah,” Nassar said, echoing the fear and confusion many Palestinians have expressed about the Israeli military’s evacuation orders in recent days.

An Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, said Monday that people in the southern part of the Gaza Strip would not be able to use Salah al-Din Street, which he called “a battlefield” as Israeli troops advance in the area.

He said in a statement on social media that civilians should instead take another route west of the city and that there would be a temporary suspension of military activity in the Rafah camp, in the southernmost part of Gaza.

The Israeli military’s advance around Khan Younis has put a vise grip on the densely populated city, which had more than 200,000 residents before the war, and became more crowded in recent weeks as people fled the north of the territory.

Conditions in the city are grim, with little access to running water or sanitation. People are sleeping in the open, and aid workers have largely stopped distributing water and flour because of the intensity of the fighting and Israeli bombardments, UN officials have said.

More than 20,000 people have taken refuge at a training center in the city that is designed to shelter one-tenth of that number, according to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Palestinians in Gaza are being pushed into an area that covers less than one-third of the enclave, according to the United Nations.

“The level of human suffering is intolerable,” the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, who visited Gaza on Monday, said in a statement. She added: “It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible.”

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said that the Israeli military had told the agency on Monday to “remove our supplies from our medical warehouse in southern Gaza within 24 hours, as ground operations will put it beyond use.” He said he was appealing to Israel to withdraw the order.

Fighting resumed in Gaza after Israel and Hamas could not agree on further exchanges of hostages seized during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, according to Israeli and Hamas officials.

Speaking at a news conference Monday, a State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, blamed Hamas, saying the group had broken its promise to release all the women and children it was holding among the approximately 240 hostages.

Miller said one of the reasons “a number of people believe they refused to release them is they didn’t want people to hear what those women would have to say publicly.”

Pressed by a reporter, he said that he was voicing speculation, and that he was “not able to speak with a definitive assessment that that is the case.” He added, however, that, “We hope they will change their mind and release those women.”