DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Hamdan family — about a dozen people from three generations — fled their home in the middle of the night after the Israeli army ordered an evacuation from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
They found shelter with extended family members in a building further north, inside an Israeli-declared safe zone. But hours after their arrival, the building in the city of Deir al-Balah was hit by an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday afternoon, killing nine members of the family and three others.
According to hospital records and a surviving family member, a total of five children and three women are among the dead.
Israel’s Monday order for people to leave the eastern part of Khan Younis has come into effect the third mass flight of Palestinians in as many monthscausing further confusion, chaos and misery among the population as they once again search for safety.
About 250,000 people live in the area covered by the regulationaccording to the United Nations. Many of them had just returned to their homes there after fleeing the Israeli invasion of Khan Younis earlier this year — or had simply sought refuge there after escaping the Israeli offensive on the city of Rafah, further south.
The assignment also led to a panicked evacuation of the European General Hospitalone of the main medical facilities still operating in the Gaza Strip. Videos circulating on social media show people wheeling a hospital bed down a street from the hospital.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement that the hospital could no longer function because so many of its staff had been evacuated. Hours after the first evacuation orders were issued, the military said the facility itself was not included, even though it is within the zone.
Cars laden with personal belongings poured out of eastern Khan Younis on Tuesday, though the number of refugees was not immediately known. The new exodus adds to the 1 million people who have fled Rafah since May, and tens of thousands displaced in the past week by a new Israeli offensive in the Shujaiyah district of northern Gaza.
“We left everything behind,” said Munir Hamza, a father of three who fled his home in an eastern district of Khan Younis for the second time on Monday night. “We are tired of moving and displacing people.
Once we settle down somewhere and learn to live with it, the Israeli army forces people to move again, he said. “This is unbearable.”
Nowhere safe
About 15 members of the Hamdan family fled their home in Khan Younis and arrived at their extended family’s home in Deir al-Balah on Monday night, said Asmaa Salim, a relative who lived in the building.
The building was located within the expanded humanitarian zone that the Israeli military declared when it launched its offensive on Rafah in May, after the army ordered Palestinians to evacuate for security reasons.
The strike occurred around 3 p.m. Tuesday. An Associated Press video shows an entire floor of the building burned down. “Almost everyone inside was tortured, only two or three survived,” Salim told AP.
A list of the dead posted at the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said the dead included the family patriarch, 62-year-old dermatologist Hossam Hamdan, as well as his wife and their adult son and daughter. Four of their grandchildren, aged 3 to 5, and the mother of two of the children were also killed. A man and his 5-year-old son who lived in the building and a man on the street outside were also killed in the strike, which wounded 10 other people, including several children.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the attack.
Flight of Khan Younis
Monday’s evacuation order suggested that Israel would launch a new ground assault on Khan Younis, though there was no sign yet that troops would arrive. Israeli forces earlier this year waged a months-long offensive, battling Hamas militants and leaving large parts of the southern city destroyed or badly damaged.
Israel has repeatedly returned to parts of the Gaza Strip it previously invaded to root out militants it says have regrouped, a sign of Hamas’s continued capabilities even after almost nine months of war in Gaza.
At least nine people, including three children and two women, were killed in another Israeli strike in the evacuation zone overnight, according to hospital data. The army said it was carrying out retaliatory strikes after Palestinian militants fired a barrage of some 20 projectiles into Israel from Khan Younis on Monday. There were no reports of casualties or damage from the rocket attack.
The Israeli campaign has killed more than 37,900 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters in its count. Israel began its campaign after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, in which militants killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took about 250 hostage.
The Israeli military said Tuesday it estimates there are now some 1.8 million Palestinians in the humanitarian zone it has declared, an area along Gaza’s coast that covers about 14 kilometers (8.6 miles). Much of that area is now covered in tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities with limited access to aid, the U.N. and aid agencies say. Families are living amid mountains of waste and streams of water polluted by sewage.
The amount of food and other supplies entering Gaza has plummeted since the Rafah offensive began. The UN says fighting, Israeli military restrictions and general chaos – including looting of trucks by Gaza’s criminal gangs – have made it nearly impossible to collect the trucks full of supplies that Israel has allowed in. As a result, cargo is piling up and uncollected just inside Gaza at the main Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, near Rafah.
The Norwegian Refugee Council reported last week that it had surveyed nearly 1,100 families who fled Rafah and that 83% of them said they did not have access to food and more than half did not have access to safe water.
On Tuesday, more families fleeing Khan Younis tried to find space in the zone. Um Abdel-Rahman said she and her family of four children — the youngest is 3 — walked for hours at night to reach the zone but found no place to stay.
“There’s no room for anyone,” she said. “We’re waiting and we have nothing to do but wait.”
Some crowded empty plots around a largely destroyed housing complex in the western part of Khan Younis, which is within the “humanitarian zone”.
Among them was Noha al-Bana, who has been displaced four times since fleeing Gaza City in the north at the start of the war.
“We are humiliated,” she said. “No proper food, no proper water, no proper bathrooms, no proper place to sleep. … Fear, fear, fear. There is no safety. No safety at home, no safety in the tents.”
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Magdy and Keath reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.
