GAZA: Israel ordered people out of swathes of the main southern city in the Gaza Strip on Monday as it pressed its ground campaign deep into the south, sending desperate residents fleeing even as it dropped bombs on areas where it told them to go.
Israel's military posted a map on X on Monday morning with around a quarter of the city of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated at once. Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and towards Rafah, near the Egyptian border.
The Israeli military's chief Arabic-language spokesperson later said in a post on X that the central road out of Khan Younis to the north "constitutes a battlefield" and was now shut. Access would be permitted on the western outskirts of the city, while in Rafah, a short "tactical suspension of military activities" would allow access until the early afternoon.
Israel is putting civilians in danger by operating from civilian areas, destroying areas by large bombs.
As many as 80 per cent of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes in an Israeli bombing campaign that has reduced much of the crowded coastal strip to a desolate wasteland. Medical officials in the enclave say bombing has killed more than 15,899 people, with thousands more missing and feared buried in rubble.
"The goals in the northern section have almost been met," the commander of Israel's armoured corps, Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim, told Israel's Army Radio. "We are beginning to expand the ground manoeuvre to other parts of the Strip, with one goal: to topple Hamas group."
The United Nations said the areas in the south that Israel has ordered evacuated in the three days since the truce had housed more than 350,000 people before the war — not counting the hundreds of thousands now sheltering there from other areas.
In Khan Younis, many of those taking flight on Monday were already displaced from other areas.
At a home that was struck overnight, flames licked the collapsed masonry and grey smoke billowed out from the rubble. A child's stuffed toy of a sheep lay in a pile of dust. Boys were picking through the wreckage. Next door, Nesrine Abdelmoty stood amid damaged furniture in the rented room where she lives with her daughter and two-year-old baby.
"We were sleeping at 5 am when we felt things collapse, everything went upside down," she said. "They told people to move from the north to Khan Younis, since the south is safer. And now, they've bombed Khan Younis. Even Khan Younis is not safe now, and even if we move to Rafah, Rafah is not safe as well. Where do they want us to go?" — Reuters
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