JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel on Saturday called on Palestinian civilians from several neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah to evacuate to “humanitarian areas” in Al-Mawasi, as the army steps up activity ahead of a possible operation earthly.
The Israeli army also asked residents and displaced people in the Djabalia region in northern Gaza to leave. The IDF plans to intervene in the area after noticing that Hamas was trying to reestablish itself militarily there.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 37 Palestinians, including 24 from central Gaza, were killed in nighttime airstrikes in the enclave, including in Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, bordering with Egypt.
Some 300,000 Gazans headed towards Al-Mawasi, according to the Israeli army.
“They are sending leaflets to Rafah saying that people should evacuate to Al-Zawayda and that it is safe. But what has become of them? There are no safe places in the Gaza Strip,” he told Reuters Khitam Al-Khatib, who says he lost at least ten members of his family in a strike that hit his home on Saturday.
Al-Zawayda is a small town in the center of the Gaza Strip which was invaded by thousands of Gazans who took refuge there.
The Israeli army said its planes had struck dozens of targets across Gaza over the past day, adding that its ground troops had killed around 30 fighters in Zeitoun.
An Israeli airstrike killed at least seven people from the same family in a house in the town of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, doctors said. According to residents, Israeli tanks were stationed in the town.
In Rafah, where the Health Ministry counted 16 people killed, residents told Reuters that the Israeli army’s new evacuation orders covered central areas of the city and left no doubt about the intent of Israel to extend its land offensive there.
“The situation is really complicated, people are fleeing their homes in panic,” Khaled, 35, a resident of the Shaboura neighborhood affected by the Israeli army’s evacuation order, told Reuters.
The Israeli army said it was continuing its operation against Hamas fighters east of Rafah.
Two essential crossing points for the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza were still closed on Saturday.
According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, the Rafah crossing point has been closed for the fifth consecutive day, that of Kerem Shalom, for about a week.
These new evacuations come as US President Joe Biden this week suspended a delivery of bombs, a first since the start of the war, and threatened to do the same for all “offensive” weapons if the Israeli government persists in its project in Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken refuge to escape the conflict.
The Israeli army took control of the road that cuts Rafah in two on Friday, effectively surrounding the entire eastern part of the city in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli tanks had already taken control of the crossing point with Egypt this week, seriously threatening the delivery and distribution of humanitarian aid intended for civilians, which was already very insufficient, Israeli agencies warned. UN.
Several Western countries and the United Nations have warned that an assault in Rafah, where nearly half of the 2.3 million Gazans who have fled the fighting are massed, could cause a humanitarian catastrophe.
More than 35,000 people, most of them civilians according to Gaza health authorities, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the start of the offensive launched by Israel in response to the Hamas attack in which 1,200 people were killed .
(Reporting by Maytaal Angel: Zhifan Liu and Elizabeth Pineau for the French version)
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