More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled Israeli attacks around the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in four days, the United Nations said Friday, after an operation by the Israeli army to extract captives’ bodies from the area.
Recent “intensified hostilities” in the Khan Younis area, more than nine months into the Israel-Hamas war, have fuelled “new waves of internal displacement across Gaza”, said the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA.
It said that “about 182,000 people” have been displaced from central and eastern Khan Younis between Monday and Thursday, while “hundreds of other people remain stranded in eastern Khan Younis”.
The Israeli military on Monday forced Palestinians to evacuate parts of the southern city, announcing that it would “forcefully operate” there, including in a area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.
On Wednesday, Israel said five bodies of captives seized during Hamas’s October 7 attack had been recovered from the area.
Since the latest fighting began in Khan Younis this week, Israel’s military claimed on Friday that its forces had “eliminated approximately 100 terrorists” in the city.
Witnesses and rescuers said Israeli attacks continued on Friday around eastern Khan Yunis, where the civil defence agency said shelling killed at least two people in a house.
Israel’s indiscriminate war on Gaza has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians and injured over 90,000 more.
According to UN figures, the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once by the fighting.
