Gaza: Gaza's civil defence agency said on Tuesday that an Israeli operation in and around the territory's second city of Khan Yunis killed about 300 people since it began last week.
"Since the beginning of the Israeli ground invasion of the eastern part of Khan Yunis province, the civil defence and medical teams have recovered approximately 300 bodies of martyrs, many of them decomposed," agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.
The Israeli military launched the assault on July 22 to halt rocket fire from the area, which already saw heavy fighting earlier this year.
Last week, it said troops had retrieved the bodies of five Israelis from the area.
They had been killed during the Hamas attacks of October 7 and their bodies taken back to Gaza, the military said.
Thousands of Palestinians returned to their homes in the ruins of Gaza's main southern city Khan Younis on Tuesday, after Israeli forces ended a week-long incursion there which they said aimed to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
Palestinian rescue workers and civilians collected dead bodies from the streets of the abandoned battle zone, bringing corpses wrapped in rugs to morgues in cars and donkey carts.
The Gaza media office said Israel's eight-day-long raid in eastern areas of Khan Younis killed 255 Palestinians and wounded more than 300 others. At leas 30 people remained missing.
The Israeli military said its forces killed more than 150 Palestinian gunmen during the week-long raid, destroyed militant tunnels and seized weapons.
After the Israeli forces left, people streamed back to their homes on foot and with carts carrying their belongings. Many found their houses damaged or destroyed. The Hamas media office said more than 300 homes had been hit by Israeli fire during the raid, at least 30 of them inhabited when they were struck.
Witnesses said army forces had bulldozed the main cemetery in Bani Suhaila, the town on the eastern outskirts of Khan Younis that was the main focus of the raid, as well as houses and roads nearby.
"I am coming back and I have faith in God. I don't know whether we will live or die, but it is all for the sake of the homeland," said Etimad Al-Masri, who had walked for at least five km back to her home.
"Despite the suffering, we are patient and God's willing we will have victory."
Many residents said they had been displaced from their homes several times.
"We hope there will be a ceasefire and calm. We hope that they act on a ceasefire so that we can live in security and safety," said Walid Abu Nsaira, holding some of his belongings on his shoulder as he walked back home.
As the Khan Younis assault has wound down, Israel has ordered thousands of people out of homes in al-Bureij in the central Gaza Strip, launching strikes there in apparent preparation for a new raid.
Medics said an Israeli air strike in nearby al-Nuseirat killed 10 Palestinians as they fled from Bureij on Tuesday, and another strike killed four other Palestinians inside Bureij.
Ten months into the war, Israeli forces have largely completed their storming of nearly the entire Gaza Strip and have spent the past several weeks launching new assaults on areas where they had already claimed to have rooted out Hamas. Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate their homes, most of them previously displaced several times already.
Efforts to negotiate a ceasefire through mediators, ongoing for months, are once again faltering. On Monday, Israel and Hamas traded blame over the lack of progress.
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