GAZA: Tens of thousands of already displaced Palestinian families took flight again in a new mass exodus in central Gaza on Thursday, where Israeli forces mounting a major advance pounded areas already teeming with those driven out of the north.
Further south, Israeli forces struck the area around a hospital in the heart of Khan Younis, the Gaza Strip's main southern city, where residents feared a new ground push into territory crowded with families made homeless in 12 weeks of war.
Israel has escalated its ground war in Gaza sharply since just before Christmas despite public pleas from its closest ally the United States to scale the campaign down in the closing weeks of the year.
The main focus of fighting is now in central areas south of the wetlands that bisect the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have ordered civilians out as their tanks advance.
Tens of thousands of people fleeing the huge Nusseirat, Bureij and Maghazi districts of central Gaza were heading south or west on Thursday into the already overwhelmed city of Deir al-Balah along the Mediterranean coast, crowding into hastily built camps of makeshift tents.
"Over 150,000 people — young children, women carrying babies, people with disabilities & the elderly — have nowhere to go," the main UN organisation operating in Gaza, UNRWA, said in a social media post decrying what it called "forced displacement" under Israeli evacuation orders.
The eastern part of Bureij was a theatre of heavy fighting on Thursday morning, with Israeli tanks pushing in from the north and east, residents said.
"That moment has come, I wished it would never happen, but it seems displacement is a must," said Omar, 60, who said he had been forced to move with at least 35 family members.
"We are now in a tent in Deir al-Balah because of this brutal Israeli war," he said by phone, declining to give a second name for fear of reprisals. "Israel is killing doctors, social media influencers, journalists, and civilians."
Khan Younis, the main southern city where Israeli forces advanced this month after a truce collapsed, came under heavy bombardment on Thursday morning from warplanes and tanks near the Al-Amal Hospital, west of Israeli positions.
The Palestinian Red Crescent, which runs the hospital and has its headquarters nearby, said 10 Palestinians were killed and 12 wounded in one bombardment there, the third strike targeting the area around the hospital in less than an hour. — Reuters
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