Israel orders residents from southern Gaza towns, raising fear of war’s spread

GAZA/JERUSALEM – Israel ordered civilians to leave four towns in the southern part of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, raising fears that its war against Hamas could spread to areas it had told people were safe.

In the north of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave, Israel said its forces were still present at Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, but gave no further details of their operations since the previous day when they entered the facility, culminating a days-long siege.

Leaflets dropped from aircraft told civilians to leave the towns of Bani Shuhaila, Khuzaa, Abassan and Qarara, on the eastern edge of Khan Younis, the main southern city.

The towns, collectively home to more than 100,000 people during peacetime, are now sheltering tens of thousands more who fled other areas.

“The acts of Hamas terrorist group require the defence forces to act against them in the areas of your residence,” the leaflets read. “For your safety, you need to evacuate your places of residence immediately and head to known shelters.”

Residents said the area came under heavy bombardment overnight.

Israel had already ordered the evacuation of the entire northern half of Gaza before sending in its ground forces at the end of October.

Long processions of people, clutching just a few possessions, have made their way south each day under the eyes of Israeli soldiers during six-hour “tactical pauses” to allow residents to leave.

The United Nations says around two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless, most of them sheltering in towns in the south, since Israel began its retaliation against Hamas for a deadly rampage in southern Israeli towns.

Hamas militants burst through the fence around Gaza on Oct 7 in an assault that Israel says killed 1,200 people in the deadliest day in its history. Around 240 hostages were dragged to Gaza.

Since then, Israel has pounded Gaza with air strikes and cut off food and fuel.

The Gaza health authorities deemed reliable by the UN say more than 11,000 people have been confirmed killed, over 40 per cent of them children, with many more feared trapped under the rubble of bombed-out homes.

Communications cut

The situation on the second day of Israel’s operation in Al-Shifa Hospital was impossible to confirm, with communications cut off since Wednesday afternoon.

The plight of the hospital had drawn international alarm, with hundreds of patients and thousands of other displaced civilians trapped inside without fuel, oxygen or basic supplies.

Medics said dozens of patients had died in recent days as a result of Israel’s siege, including three newborns in incubators that lost power.

The UN is looking for ways to evacuate Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, but options are limited by security and logistical constraints, a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Thursday.

One obstacle is that the Palestinian Red Crescent lacks sufficient fuel for its ambulances within Gaza to evacuate patients, WHO regional emergency director Rick Brennan said.

There are also not enough ambulances available, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem said.

A day after entering Al-Shifa, Israel is yet to produce evidence showing what it had claimed was vast Hamas headquarters in tunnels beneath the facility, which the country said justified it treating the hospital as a military target.

Israel released a video in which a soldier toured a hospital building, showing three bags with guns and flak jackets he said had been found stashed there, as well as several other rifles in a closet and a laptop computer.

Mr Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, who now works as a visiting professor at Princeton University, said on social media platform X: “Israel will have to come up with a lot more than a handful of ‘grab-and-go’ rifles to justify shutting down northern Gaza’s hospitals with its enormous cost for a civilian population with urgent medical needs.”

Hamas said the video was staged. Other Palestinians said it depicted nothing like the vast underground militant headquarters complex that Israel had claimed was inside the compound.

“These are weak pretexts. There is nothing for the resistance inside medical institutions,” said Dr Nahed Abu Taaema, the director of the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, who said medics were worried about their colleagues at Al-Shifa after losing contact with them since Wednesday.

The Israelis “claimed that there were command centres in Al-Shifa, and when they then didn’t find anything, they stood up ashamed in front of the world, so they had to make some pretexts for the lies they previously published”, he said.

He was very concerned about his colleagues and patients in Al-Shifa because they were exposed to “imminent danger”.

“The smell of death is everywhere as martyrs’ bodies are scattered everywhere in the yards and no one can bury them,” he said.

Attention was focused anew on Thursday on Israel’s future plans for Gaza after President Isaac Herzog told Britain’s Financial Times newspaper that a “very strong force” may need to remain there for the near future to prevent the Hamas militant group re-emerging after the war.

US President Joe Biden warned on Wednesday that occupying Gaza would be “a big mistake” for Israel.

The United States expressed deep concern on Thursday that Jordanian medics were wounded in shelling near their field hospital in Gaza.

Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said seven staff at its field hospital in northern Gaza were wounded by Israeli shelling.

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday called Jordan a critical ally and said its “essential role in the conflict must be protected”. REUTERS