Palestinians in the Gaza Strip sought shelter in an ever-shrinking area of the south on Sunday as Israel stepped up its bombing from air, sea and land across the enclave.
Bombardments were concentrated on Khan Younis and Rafah in the south, residents said. Hospitals were struggling to cope with the flow of wounded, they said.
The renewed warfare followed the collapse on Friday of a seven-day pause in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants to allow an exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
It took place despite growing calls from the United States, Israel’s closest ally, for Israel to avoid further harm to Palestinian civilians.
More than 15,400 have been killed as of Sunday, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, in nearly two months of warfare that broke out after a Hamas cross-border raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage.
Israel says it is acting to annihilate Hamas, saying it poses a mortal threat to the Jewish state’s very existence. The present war has become the deadliest in decades in the wider Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Gaza residents said on Sunday they feared an Israeli ground offensive on the southern areas was imminent. Tanks had cut off the road between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, effectively dividing the Gaza Strip into three areas, they said.
The Israeli military issued a statement ordering Palestinians to immediately evacuate half a dozen areas in and around Khan Younis. It posted a map highlighting shelters they should go to west of Khan Younis and south toward Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
Residents said the Israeli military dropped leaflets that read, “Khan Younis city is a dangerous combat zone.”
But residents said that areas they had been told to go to were themselves coming under attack. There was hardly any space for more displaced people in the south after hundreds of thousands had fled the Israeli ground invasion in the north of the enclave, they said.
UN officials and residents said it was difficult to heed Israeli evacuation orders because of patchy internet access and no regular supply of electricity.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that Israel was co-ordinating with the U.S. and international organizations to define “safe areas” for Gaza civilians.
“We will continue the war until we achieve all its goals, and it’s impossible to achieve those goals without the ground operation,” Netanyahu said in an address Saturday night.
Tunnels destroyed
Israeli forces have found 800 shafts leading to Hamas’s vast subterranean network of tunnels and bunkers since a Gaza ground operation began on Oct 27, and have destroyed more than half of them, the military said on Sunday.
The Israeli army released video on Sunday it says shows soldiers finding and destroying the tunnel shafts and said many were in civilian areas like schools, mosques, kindergartens and playgrounds. Reuters was not able to independently verify the locations or the dates when the videos were recorded.
The Palestinian Islamist group said before the war that it had hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, a network comparable in size to the New York subway system, to protect and serve as operational bases.
Palestinian health officials, meanwhile, said airstrikes destroyed several houses in the Al-Karara town near Khan Younis overnight, killing several people, including children.
Residents and Hamas media reported intensive bombing, east of Zeitoun in Gaza City and in Tel Al-Zaatar in northern Gaza Strip.
In Bani Suhaila, east of Khan Younis, Palestinian health officials said two people were killed and others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house. Bombing in Tel Al-Zaatar destroyed the houses of two families and caused casualties, medics said.
The handful of hospitals in Khan Younis that are still operating were flooded with wounded, and with crying people mourning loved ones killed.
Reports of rocket fire on Tel Aviv
Hamas said it targeted the coastal Israeli city of Tel Aviv with a rocket barrage. There were no reports of damage, but paramedics said one man was treated for a shrapnel injury in central Israel.
Reuters could not independently verify the accounts.
Featured VideoWarning: This story contains disturbing images | Israel and Hamas resume fighting after a weeklong truce falls apart. In Israel, hopes fade for the people who remain as Hamas hostages, while in Gaza the death toll begins to rise again.
In a sign of growing U.S. concern about the human cost of the war, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin deemed it a “moral responsibility” for Israel to protect civilians.
Speaking in Dubai on Saturday, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris said Israel had a right to defend itself, but international and humanitarian law must be respected.
Images of civilian suffering ‘devastating,’ Harris says
“Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza, are devastating,” Harris told reporters.
Austin weighed in with perhaps his strongest comments yet on Israel’s need to protect civilians in Gaza, calling it a “moral responsibility and strategic imperative.”
“If you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat,” Austin told a defence forum in Simi Valley, Calif.
Austin also pledged the United States would stand by Israel as its “closest friend in the world.”
About 1.8 million people, or 80 per cent of the population of the Gaza Strip, have fled their homes since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations.
Featured VideoIsmail Al-Ustad, his wife, Asmaa, and their three children have been living in a UN-run displacement camp in Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, for 35 days. Ismail and Asmaa both say they hope they can return to their former lives in Gaza City, but are concerned about the immediate future.
Since the outbreak of war two months ago, more than 400,000 displaced people have sought shelter in the city of Rafah and nearly 300,000 displaced people have taken shelter in the city of Khan Younis, according to the UN humanitarian office.
Disease is spreading rapidly through overcrowded shelters in existing refugee camps and makeshift housing in schools, the World Health Organization said.
The warring sides blamed each other for the collapse of the truce, during which Hamas had released hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.