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JERUSALEM — Fighting in South Gaza intensified Wednesday as Israeli troops entered Khan Younis, once a haven for Palestinians fleeing the hostilities, driving thousands more displaced civilians to makeshift tent cities in areas farther south that are jammed with refugees.
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A strike also was reported in Rafah, an area Israel has told Gazans to flee to for their safety.
The Israeli army said its tanks had reached the center of Khan Younis, the largest city in the south and reportedly the stronghold of Yehiya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Commanders said they were engaged in some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
Khan Younis has been crowded with civilians displaced by earlier fighting in northern Gaza. On Wednesday, Israel warned thousands of residents and refugees to evacuate, setting many on the move for the second or third time in two months of war.
Israel touts civilian warning system, but for Gazans, nowhere is safe
Dozens were killed Tuesday in an Israeli strike on a school in Khan Younis, witnesses told The Washington Post. Gaza health ministry officials said they were still counting casualties from airstrikes there and elsewhere; many of the dead, they said, remained buried under rubble.
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The current hostilities began when Hamas and allied fighters streamed out of Gaza on Oct. 7 to rampage through Israeli communities, killing at least 1,200 people and taking about 240 back to the enclave as hostages. Captives who have been released have related harrowing details of their time in Hamas hands, including beatings and sexual abuse of male and female captives.
Israel responded to the surprise attack with a campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. At least 15,899 Gazans have been killed since, health ministry officials there say.
International outrage over the climbing civilian death toll is mounting. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called on the U.N. Security Council to press for a humanitarian cease-fire to restore “the means of survival” to Gaza’s civilian population.
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“The situation is fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region,” he wrote to the council’s president.
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Israeli officials have given no sign of letting up.
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said Guterres’s call for a cease-fire “constitutes support of the Hamas terrorist organization and an endorsement of the murder of the elderly, the abduction of babies and the rape of women.
“Anyone who supports world peace must support the liberation of Gaza from Hamas,” he posted on X.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Israel would deploy “crushing force” to eliminate Hamas.
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“We are on the right path,” he told reporters. Netanyahu also indicated that Israel was prepared to keep troops inside Gaza indefinitely, in defiance of U.S. and international expectations that the enclave will be returned to Palestinian control after the war and suggestions that international peacekeepers could step in.
“No international force can be responsible for this,” Netanyahu said. “I’m not ready to close my eyes and accept any other arrangement.”
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The prime minister’s office announced Wednesday that Israel would allow a “minimal supplement” of fuel to enter southern Gaza. Aid groups have stressed that more fuel is needed to power the enclave’s hospitals, desalination plants and ovens.
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Israel-Gaza war
(Oded Balilty/AP)
Israel’s military continued combat operations across the Gaza Strip, striking major cities in the south and engaging in “intense fighting” with Hamas militants in two key regions in the north, a government spokesman said.
For context: Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war.
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Israeli forces launched ground and air assaults Wednesday in the Jabalya area of northern Gaza and in Shejaiya, east of Gaza City. The Gaza health ministry said Wednesday that Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the last functioning health facilities in the north, had ceased operations following Israeli bombardments in the area.
An estimated 1.9 million Palestinians, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million population, have sought shelter in the south. As displaced families piled into Rafah at the sealed Egyptian border, officials warned that shelters were full and aid supplies inadequate. The Israel Defense Forces announced a four-hour humanitarian pause in the Rafah district midday Wednesday.
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When it was over, a strike came. A residential building in the Shaboura refugee camp was hit. More than two dozen people were wounded or killed, eyewitnesses said.
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Abdel Hamid Al-Nims, a Shaboura resident who lives near the building that was struck, told The Post that many women and children were among the dead.
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Journalist Adly Abu Taha, who was at the nearby Kuwaiti hospital, told The Post that a “large number of injured people arrived at hospitals in critical condition.” Others were taken to the Najjar hospital in Rafah, he said.
The IDF said that it could not comment on the strike without being given the exact coordinates but that it was “checking” into reports.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called the “catastrophic situation” in Gaza “entirely foreseeable and preventable.”
“My humanitarian colleagues have described the situation as apocalyptic,” he told reporters in Geneva.
U.N. monitors said that Rafah’s population had doubled to 470,000 and that another half a million could be on the way. The U.N. agency for Palestinian affairs said it had distributed hundreds of tents, which refugees were squeezing into spaces adjacent to two official shelters.
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Hundreds of people could be seen setting up makeshift shelters from plastic sheets, blankets and tents in the Mawasi area.
Israeli military officials have encouraged displaced Gazans to seek shelter in the area, a stretch of coast with little infrastructure. U.N. spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai told The Post on Tuesday that the agency was “not aware of distribution in Mawasi.”
Elsewhere, people spread tarps on the street and joined the general search for food. A bag of black-market flour cost $200, residents said; the cost of cooking oil, which families use for both food and fuel, has also spiked.
One physician who fled northern Gaza went to pick up free rations from a U.N. distribution center for his family of seven.
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“I went there yesterday at 4 and found people sleeping there for days waiting to get their shares,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “No one got anything yesterday because aid didn’t come in through the border yesterday.”
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Hana Awad, a journalist and mother of three from Gaza City who was sheltering in Rafah, said everything was getting worse.
“All the basic food necessities are missing. Anything that’s related to clothes or mattresses is missing,” she said in a voice message sent to The Post. “The displaced people who came in the last two days — they spread nylon on the ground. Some are in cars. Some of them are in the street, literally on the sidewalks. There’s rain. Life is really harsh and hard.”
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For many, moving toward Rafah is not an option.
“The population density is too high,” 41-year old Fadi Ahmed said. “There is not even a place in the street for us to live.”
His family had taken flight for the second time in a week. When airstrikes hit their neighborhood early Tuesday, he and his wife and children tried to walk to the center of Khan Younis.
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The Israelis said “hostilities will be concentrated in the east,” Ahmed told The Post, “but we noticed tanks were heading toward the city center. We don’t know which way to go now.”
Israel’s top commander, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, described the combat as the third phase of military operations in Gaza, expanding farther into the south after aerial and ground attacks in the north. Israel has pledged to continue fighting until Hamas is “eliminated” as a military and political entity.
Eylon Levy, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, said IDF troops had fully encircled Khan Younis on Wednesday. “And we are working to destroy the terror infrastructure that it has built above and below ground in civilian areas,” he said.
Levy said the IDF had killed half of Hamas’s battalion commanders, including most of the senior leadership of the group’s northern Gaza brigade. Israel says it has killed more than 6,000 Hamas militants. Analysts say that remains far short of a killing blow to Hamas, which is estimated to field at least 30,000 fighters.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas. Yet the group remains largely intact.
The IDF and Hezbollah forces continued to exchange fire on Israel’s border with Lebanon. The Lebanese army said three of its soldiers were killed Tuesday in Israeli shelling.
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In Israel, the families of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza protested in Tel Aviv to demand that their loved ones be brought home. Divisions have widened between those calling for a halt in the fighting while more hostages are released and those who see the war as the best way to pressure Hamas.
Anger erupted at a meeting with Netanyahu on Tuesday night. Some family members stormed out.
“We asked if returning the captives is the primary goal now,” Bashir Alziadana, the brother of two hostages, told Haaretz. “I didn’t leave with a clear answer.”
Hajar Harb and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
Israel-Gaza war Israel’s military continued combat operations across the Gaza Strip, striking major cities in the south and engaging in “intense fighting” with Hamas militants in two key regions in the north, a government spokesman said.
Hostages: More than 100 hostages held in the Gaza Strip have been released. Here’s what we know about the hostages released by Hamas so far.
Oct. 7 attack: Hamas spent more than a year planning its historic assault on Israel. A Post video analysis shows how Hamas exploited vulnerabilities created by Israel’s reliance on technology at the “Iron Wall” to carry out the deadliest attack in Israel’s history. Traders earned millions anticipating the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, a new study found.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has a complicated history. Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war and see the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Israel-Gaza war
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