KHAN YOUNIS: Israeli troops fought their way back into an eastern section of Khan Younis in a surprise raid, residents said on Monday, sending people who had returned to abandoned homes in the ruins of the southern Gaza Strip's main city fleeing once more.
Elsewhere in Khan Younis, scores more bodies were recovered from what Palestinian authorities said were mass graves on the site of the city's main hospital, abandoned by Israeli troops. Further south there were fresh air strikes on Rafah, the last refuge where more than half of the enclave's 2.3 million people have sought shelter.
Israel abruptly pulled most of its ground troops out of the southern Gaza Strip this month after some of the most intense fighting of the seven-month-old war. Residents have begun making their way home to previously unaccessible neighbourhoods of what had been the enclave's second-biggest city, finding homes reduced to rubble and unrecovered dead in the streets.
"This morning many families who had left here in the past two weeks to go back home to Abassan came back. They were too frightened," Ahmed Rezik, 42, told Reuters from a school where he is sheltering in the western part of Khan Younis, referring to a district in the east. "They said tanks pushed in the eastern area of the town under heavy fire, and they had to run for lives," he said.
In the ruins of what had been Nasser hospital, the biggest in southern Gaza, witnesses saw emergency workers in white hazmat suits digging corpses out of the ground with hand tools and a digger truck. The emergency services said 73 more bodies had been found at the site in the past day, raising the number found over the week to 283.
Israel says it was forced to battle inside hospitals because fighters operated there, which medical staff and Palestinian groups deny.
Gaza authorities say the bodies recovered so far are from just one of at least three mass graves they have found at the site.
"We expect to find another 200 bodies at the same mass grave in the coming two days before we will begin working at the two other cemeteries," Ismail Al-Thawabta said, director of the government media office. He accused Israel of carrying out "executions" at the hospital and covering up the crimes by burying bodies with a bulldozer.
Gaza residents reported air strikes in several other areas, including Rafah. In Nusseirat in central Gaza, officials said an air strike had damaged solar panels the hospital relies on for power. — Reuters
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