Gazans flee as Israeli forces push into Khan Yunis

KHAN YUNIS, Palestinian Territories — Palestinians fled southern Gaza's main city on Sunday as Israel warned of a new military operation, a day after one of the deadliest reported strikes in more than 10 months of war.

The Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip has sent tensions soaring across the region, including in the occupied West Bank where medics said an Israeli man was killed Sunday in a shooting.

Intense diplomacy in recent days sought to avert a wider war in the Middle East following the killings of Iran-aligned leaders, while international mediators invited Israel and Hamas to resume stalled talks towards a long-sought Gaza truce and hostage-release deal.

AFP journalists said hundreds of Palestinians fled northern neighbourhoods of Khan Yunis, southern Gaza's main city already ravaged by months of bombardment and battles, after Israel issued fresh evacuation orders in the early morning.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said that "just in the past few days, more than 75,000 people have been displaced in southwest Gaza". The entire territory has a population of about 2.4 million people.

Families gathered their meagre belongings as crowds of people left Al Jalaa, some loading mattresses, clothing and cooking utensils into pick-up trucks. Others took to the road on foot.

Umm Sami Shahada, a 55-year-old displaced Palestinian, said she had “fled Gaza City at the start of the war for Khan Yunis”, hoping to find shelter.

“My daughter was killed in bombardment, so we went to Rafah, then we came back here, and now with this new evacuation order we don’t know where to go,” she said.

In northern Gaza, an Israeli air strike on Friday killed at least 93 people at a religious school housing displaced Palestinians, according to civil defence rescuers, sparking international condemnation.

Israel said it targeted militants operating out of Gaza City’s Al Tabieen school and mosque with “precise munitions”, declaring that “at least 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists were eliminated”.

The death toll, which AFP could not independently verify, would be one of the largest from a single strike since the war began.

Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the civil defence agency in Hamas-run Gaza, said on Sunday that identifying the victims could take at least two days as “we have many bodies torn into pieces” and “shredded or burnt by the bombs”.

Hamas in a statement called Arab and Muslim nations to “take effective decisions” to stop the war and demanded an urgent UN Security Council meeting to force Israel “to stop the aggression and genocide”.

The Palestinian group, which has named its Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar to succeed slain political leader Ismail Haniyeh, has yet to respond to an invitation from US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators for truce negotiations on August 15. Israel has accepted.

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Tehran on July 31, an attack blamed on Israel which has not claimed responsibility. But hours earlier it the military chief of Lebanese Hamas ally Hizbollah in a strike on Beirut.

Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah and other regional allies have vowed retaliation, spurring fears of a wider conflagration.

US President Joe Biden, asked what his message was to Iran, responded: “Don’t”.