Israel has issued a new warning to Palestinians in the town of Han Younis to withdraw from the line of fire.
“We’re asking people to move. I know it’s not easy for many of them, but we don’t want to see civilians caught in the crossfire,” Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC.
Such a move could force hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have fled south since Israel’s assault on Gaza to resettle, along with residents of Han Yunis, a city of more than 400,000, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis.
Israel has vowed to destroy the Hamas group that controls the Gaza Strip after its October 7 attack in which its fighters killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages in the enclave.
Since then, Israel has bombarded much of Gaza City, ordered the evacuation of the entire northern half of the narrow strip, and left about two-thirds of the enclave’s 2.3 million Palestinians homeless. Many of those who have fled fear that their displacement could become permanent.
The health authorities in Gaza increased the death toll to more than 12,000 yesterday, of which 5,000 were children. The UN considers those figures to be credible, although they are now rarely updated due to difficulties in gathering information.
