WARNING: This story contains distressing images
Israel ordered residents out of the centre of Gaza’s main southern city, Khan Younis, on Saturday and pounded the length of the Hamas-run enclave, after the United States wielded its UN Security Council veto to shield its ally from a demand for a ceasefire.
Since a truce collapsed last week, Israel has expanded its ground campaign into the southern half of the Gaza Strip by pushing into Khan Younis. Simultaneously, both sides have reported a surge in fighting in the north.
Israel’s Arabic-language spokesperson posted a map on X, formerly Twitter, highlighting six numbered blocks of Khan Younis that residents were told to evacuate “urgently.” They included parts of the city centre that had not been subject to such orders before.
Israel issued similar warnings before storming eastern parts of the city, and residents said they feared new evacuation orders heralded a further assault.
“It might be a matter of time before they act against our area, too. We have been hearing bombing all night,” said Zainab Khalil, 57, displaced with 30 of her relatives and friends in Khan Younis near Jalal Street, where troops told people to leave.
“We don’t sleep at night, we stay awake, we try to put the children to sleep, and we stay up fearing the place would be bombed and we’ll have to run carrying the children out. During the day begins another tragedy, and that is: how to feed the children?”
With food and medical supplies also scarce, a senior United Nations World Food Program official said a new system was being tested to bring aid into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, potentially allowing imports to ramp up. However, Israel has not yet agreed to open the crossing.
The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have already been forced from their homes, many fleeing several times. With fighting raging across the length of the territory, residents and UN agencies say there is now effectively nowhere safe to go, though Israel disputes this.
Death toll mounts
In Khan Younis, the dead and wounded arrived through the night at the overwhelmed Nasser Hospital.
A medic ran out of an ambulance with the limp body of a small girl in a pink tracksuit. Inside, wounded children wailed and writhed on the tile floor as nurses raced to comfort them. Outside, bodies were lined up in white shrouds.
Nasser and another southern hospital, Al-Aqsa in Deir al-Balah, reported 133 dead and 259 wounded between them in the past 24 hours, raising a death toll that has exceeded 17,700, according to Health Ministry officials in Hamas-run Gaza, with many thousands more missing and presumed dead.
Israel holds Hamas responsible for civilian casualties, accusing the militants of using civilians as human shields, and says it’s made considerable efforts with its evacuation orders to get civilians out of harm’s way.
It says 93 Israeli soldiers have died in the ground offensive after Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 raid in Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and resulted in 240 being taken hostage.
Hamas said on Saturday that it continued its rocket fire into Israel.
Outside of Khan Younis, Gaza residents reported airstrikes and shelling in the north and south, including the city of Rafah near the Egyptian border — one area where the Israeli army had ordered civilians to evacuate to.
Israel has been trying to secure the military’s hold on northern Gaza despite heavy resistance from Hamas. Tens of thousands of residents are believed to remain despite evacuation orders, six weeks after troops and tanks rolled in.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that its forces fought and killed Hamas militants and found weapons inside a school in Shijaia, in a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza City.
It said soldiers discovered a tunnel shaft in the same neighbourhood where they found an elevator, and in a separate incident, militants shot at troops from a UN-run school in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
Calls for ceasefire get louder
At the United Nations on Friday, Washington used its veto to reject a vote by 13 of the Security Council’s 15 members backing a resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Britain abstained.
Washington has said it told Israel to do more to fulfil promises it made to protect civilians in the next phase of the war. But the Whitei House still backs Israel’s position that a ceasefire would benefit Hamas.
The U.S. has vetoed an emergency resolution at the UN Security Council — triggered by the secretary general with a rarely used power to force a vote — for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and to allow more aid into the area.
“We do not support this resolution’s call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war,” Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told the Security Council before exercising Washington’s veto.
Ezzat El-Reshiq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, condemned the U.S. veto as “inhumane.” Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, said the veto made the U.S. complicit in Israeli war crimes.
Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Fox News on Saturday that a ceasefire would leave Hamas in charge.
“That just takes us back to Oct. 6,” he said, adding the group needed to be finished “once and for all.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken continued to meet with counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere as frustration grew with the U.S. stance. Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Hakan Fidan has said the U.S. veto of the UN Security Council resolution showed Washington’s isolation. The group was to meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Saturday.
Despite restrictions on demonstrations, protesters at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, U.A.E., called for a ceasefire.