By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO (Reuters) – Israeli forces leading a week-long offensive in northern Gaza on Sunday ordered all residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to leave the town, citing rocket fire by Palestinian militants from the area, reports said. declared by residents.
The order to leave sparked a new wave of displacement, although the number of people affected was not immediately clear, residents said.
Israel says its campaign launched nearly three months ago in northern Gaza targets Hamas militants and prevents them from regrouping. His instructions to civilians to evacuate are intended to keep them out of danger, the military says.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say no place is safe in Gaza and the evacuations are worsening humanitarian conditions for the population.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of residents and razed, fueling speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the end of the fighting in Gaza.
The Israeli army announced a new offensive in the Beit Hanoun region on Saturday. He said rocket fire into Israel continued throughout Sunday despite the intense operation there.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said it had lost communication with people still trapped in the city and was unable to send teams to the area due to the raid.
Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 23 people on Sunday. One of the strikes killed seven people and injured others at Al-WAFA hospital in Gaza City, Palestinian Civil Emergency Services said in a statement.
Later Sunday, an Israeli airstrike killed seven more people at a house in Beit Hanoun, doctors said. There was no immediate Israeli comment.
HOSPITALS
Health officials said on Sunday that an Israeli tank shell hit the upper floor of Al-Ahly Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, near the X-ray division.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted members of Hamas’s “air defense unit” who were operating from the compound, saying the location was no longer used as a hospital. It said militants were using the compound to plan and execute attacks against Israeli troops in the immediate future.
Israeli forces stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on Friday, arresting more than 240 Palestinians, including doctors.
The army said the hospital had been used as a Hamas command center, adding on Sunday that 15 of those detained took part in the October 7 attack on Israel and that its operation there killed about 20 militants.
Hamas denies Israel’s claim that its fighters operate from hospitals and has called for U.N. observers to be sent to medical facilities in Gaza.
The raid on Kamal Adwan, one of three medical facilities on Gaza’s northern edge, knocked out the region’s last major health facility, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in an article on X.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million people has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
The war was sparked by a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli counts.
(Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi, editing by William Maclean and Hugh Lawson)
