Warning: This story contains distressing images.
Israeli forces launched their storm of the main city in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, where hospitals were overrun with scores of Palestinian wounded and dead.
In what appeared to be the biggest ground assault since a truce collapsed last week, residents said Israeli tanks had entered the eastern parts of Khan Younis for the first time, crossing from the Israeli border fence and advancing west.
Some took up positions inside the town of Bani Suhaila on Khan Younis’s eastern outskirts, while others continued further and were stationed on the edge of a Qatari-funded housing development called Hamad City, residents said.
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“The situation is getting worse by the hour,” Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative in Gaza, told reporters via video link from southern Gaza. “There’s intensified bombing going on all around, including here in the southern areas, Khan Younis and even in Rafah.”
The Israelis, who seized the northern half of Gaza last month before pausing for the week-long truce, say they are now extending their ground campaign to the rest of the enclave to fulfil their objective of annihilating its Hamas rulers.
“We’re moving ahead with the second stage now. A second stage that is going to be difficult militarily,” government spokesperson Eylon Levy told reporters in a briefing.
Southern hospitals ‘totally collapsing’: Gaza official
At Khan Younis’s main Nasser hospital, the wounded arrived by ambulance, car, flatbed truck and donkey cart after what survivors described as a strike that hit a school being used as a shelter for the displaced.
Inside a ward, almost every inch of floor space was taken up by the wounded, medics hurrying from patient to patient while relatives wailed.
A doctor carried the small limp body of a dead boy in a track suit and placed him in a corner, arms splayed across the blood-smeared tile. On the floor next to him, surrounded by discarded bandages and rubber gloves, lay a wounded boy and girl, their limbs tangled with the stands holding the IV drips in their arms.
Two young girls were being treated, still covered in dust from the collapse of the house that had buried their family.
“My parents are under the rubble,” sobbed one. “I want my mum, I want my mum, I want my family.”
Outside, men carried corpses in white and bloodied shrouds to be taken away for funerals. Around a dozen bodies lay on the ground. Five or six were taken away in a motorcycle cart.
Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashra al-Qidra said at least 43 dead bodies had already reached Nasser hospital that morning, and dozens more were feared trapped under rubble or in locations unsafe for ambulances to recover them.
“Hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip are totally collapsing, they cannot deal with the quantity and quality of injuries that arrive at the hospitals,” he said.
Unconditional aid to Israel questioned
Israel’s unprecedented bombardment of the Gaza Strip has since driven 80 per cent of its 2.3 million residents from their homes, most now crowding into the southern areas now in the firing line.
According to Gaza health officials deemed reliable by the United Nations, more than 15,800 people are confirmed dead, with thousands more missing and feared buried under rubble.
Washington has called on its close ally Israel to do more to reduce harm to civilians in the next phase of the Gaza war, which Israel launched in retribution for an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas fighters who rampaged through towns, killing 1,200 people and seizing 240 hostages according to Israel’s tally. Several Canadians were among the dead.
We cannot be complicit in the current approach of the Israeli government. <a href=”https://t.co/LnGgMzkKmm”>https://t.co/LnGgMzkKmm</a>
—@SenSanders
The U.S. provides significant military aid to Israel, but some progressives on Capitol Hill believe the aid should be conditional.
“I do not think we should be appropriating $10.1 billion for the right-wing, extremist [Benjamin] Netanyahu government to continue its current military approach,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said in the chamber on Monday. “What the Netanyahu government is doing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the United States should not be complicit in those actions.”
In Tel Aviv, government spokesperson Levy said Israel was open to “constructive feedback” on reducing harm to civilians as long as the advice is consistent with its aim of destroying Hamas.
U.S. to deliver humanitarian aid
Israel says blame for harm to civilians falls on Hamas fighters who operate among them, including from tunnels below ground that can be destroyed only with huge bombs. Hamas denies this.
Since the truce collapsed, Israel has been posting an online map to tell those in Gaza which parts of the enclave to evacuate. The eastern quarter of Khan Younis was marked out on it on Monday, and is home to hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom took flight on foot.
“What civilians should do to stay safe is listen to the instructions that are coming out from our Twitter accounts, from our website, and also to look at the leaflets that are landing in their areas,” Israeli military spokesperson Richard Hecht told reporters on Tuesday.
Gazans say there is no safe place left to go, with remaining towns and shelters already overwhelmed. Israel has continued to bomb the areas where it is telling people to go, including the city of Rafah, next to the Egyptian border south of Khan Younis.
Meanwhile, U.S. aid chief Samantha Power arrived in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday, where she is expected to announce more than $21 million in additional assistance for the Palestinian people, a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spokesperson told Reuters.
Power arrived in Al Arish with a delivery of 36,000 pounds of food assistance and medical supplies airlifted by the Department of Defence from Jordan and intended for Gaza, USAID spokesperson Jessica Jennings said.