GAZA: Israeli forces bombed in Gaza City on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled for a safe haven after the army issued an evacuation order for a vast swathe of the territory's south.
Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City's Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets.
The United Nations warned that the almost nine-month-old war had "unleashed a maelstrom of human misery" and that the latest evacuation order had plunged yet more Palestinians into "an abyss of suffering".
Ten days after Netanyahu said the war's "intense phase" was winding down, the Israeli military again rained down air strikes and artillery fire in the Shujaiya district.
The Israeli army -- which issued an evacuation order for Shujaiya a week ago -- on Monday did the same for a larger area near Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, raising fears of renewed heavy battles there.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have again taken to the road, many bundling their scant belongings on top of cars or donkey carts as they sought safety elsewhere in the bombed-out wasteland.
The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 250,000 people had been affected by the latest evacuation order that covers southern areas bordering Israel and Egypt.
Almost all patients in the European Gaza Hospital and the Red Cross field hospital decided to flee following the evacuation order, the World Health Organization said.
Though the European Gaza Hospital itself is not under evacuation instructions, the order has impacted operations.
"Now only three patients remain at the European Gaza Hospital and three at the ICRC field hospital," the WHO said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the southern evacuation order covers 117 square kilometres (45 square miles), "making it the largest such order since October".
The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that the war had now displaced 80 per cent of Gaza's population.
She also said not enough aid was reaching the besieged territory and that crossings must be reopened, particularly to southern Gaza, to avert a humanitarian disaster.
"Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering, their home lives shattered, their lives upended," she said. "The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery."
Amid the war, siege and mass displacement, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions, the World Health Organization said. — AFP
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