JEDDAH: Israel on Thursday ordered Palestinians to leave four towns near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, a month after telling them to move there to avoid the bombardment of the north.
Leaflets dropped from aircraft told civilians to leave the towns of Bani Shuhaila, Khuzaa, Abassan and Qarara. More than 100,000 people usually live there, but the towns now shelter tens of thousands more who fled other areas further north.
The warning has raised fears that Israel plans a major military operation in southern Gaza, having reduced most of the north to rubble in its attempt to root out Hamas militants who killed about 1,200 Israelis and took more than 240 hostages in a cross-border raid on Oct. 7.
The UN says about two thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless, most of them sheltering in towns in the south, since Israel began its retaliation for the Hamas rampage.
Meanwhile Palestinian medical staff said they were increasingly afraid for the lives of hundreds of patients and staff at Gaza’s biggest hospital, which has been cut off from all links to the outside world for more than a day after Israeli forces stormed it.
Israel said its troops were still searching through Al-Shifa hospital for evidence of a Hamas presence. “The operation is shaped by our understanding that there is well-hidden terrorist infrastructure in the complex,” anunidentified Israeli official said.
Israel has released pictures of what it says were rifles and flak jackets found in the hospital, but no evidence of the vast underground Hamas command headquarters it said was operating in tunnels beneath it.
Kenneth Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch and now a professor at Princeton, said: “Israel will have to come up with a lot more than a handful of ‘grab and go’ rifles to justify shutting down northern Gaza’s hospitals with its enormous cost for a civilian population with urgent medical needs.”
Hospitals have special protections under international humanitarian law. “They lose those protections only if it can be shown that harmful acts have been carried out from the premises,” the rights group’s UN director Louis Charbonneau said. “The Israeli government hasn’t provided any evidence of that.”
Al-Shifa director Muhammad Abu Salamiya said the hospital had been “under occupation authority for 48 hours and every minute that passes more patients will die. We are waiting for slow death.”
