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Israel renewed its military assault in parts of Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday, in a ground and air operation that local health officials said killed and wounded scores of people, adding to the misery of a city deeply scarred after nine months of war.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had launched the operation because intelligence indicated that Palestinian militants had used the eastern part of the city — part of an area previously designated as a humanitarian, or “safe” zone — to fire rockets toward Israel and that Hamas was attempting to regroup there. Earlier on Monday, the Israeli military had warned people in that area to leave, and photographs showed thousands fleeing.
The Gazan health ministry said 70 bodies were brought to Nasser Hospital, and at least 200 other people had been wounded, adding that others were almost certainly buried under rubble. The Palestine Red Crescent said its teams in the area had dealt with at least 12 people who had been killed and 50 wounded.
Israel’s new evacuation area was previously part of its safe zone.
ISRAEL
Safe zone
Evacuation
zone declared
Monday
Evacuation zone
declared since May
Rafah
EGYPT
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1 mile
Israel’s new evacuation area was previously part of its safe zone.
ISRAEL
Safe zone
Evacuation
zone declared
Monday
Evacuation zone
declared since
early May
Rafah
EGYPT
N
2 miles
Dr. Mohammed Saqer, the director general of nursing at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, said hundreds of injured men, women, children and older people had streamed into the hospital, which lacked mattresses, blankets, syringes and other essentials.
“The situation is appalling,” Dr. Saqer said in an interview, adding that some injuries had necessitated amputations and that some people had sustained serious burns.
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The Israeli military said on Monday that it had ordered the evacuation of eastern Khan Younis because it was “about to forcefully operate against” Hamas in the area. Residents were told to seek temporary shelter closer to the coast in an area that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone.
The military had previously ordered an evacuation of the city but not everyone left, aid workers and residents said, and on Monday the military said that “remaining residents” of eastern neighborhoods of the city should go to the “adjusted Humanitarian Area in Al-Mawasi.”
“The calls for the temporary evacuation are being communicated to residents through SMS messages, phone calls and media broadcasts in Arabic,” the military said.
The military said it would “continue to act against the Hamas terrorist organization, which uses the Gazan civilians as a human shield for its terrorist activities and infrastructure.”
It was not possible to determine the sequence of Monday’s events in Khan Younis and whether the evacuation orders preceded the strikes. Photographs showed thousands of people attempting to flee the area apparently in terror, some on donkey carts and others on foot.
Almost all of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes and many have relocated repeatedly since Oct. 7, when Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed around 1,200 people and triggered the war.
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Since then, more than 39,000 people have been killed in Gaza and nearly 90,000 others have been injured, according to Palestinian health authorities. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but list the bodies of men, women, children and the elderly it has identified as distinct categories.
Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman with the main U.N. agency for the Palestinians, UNRWA, said that conditions in zone were “very dire,” with a lack of shelter, water, food, medicine and sanitation, and that many civilians — large numbers of whom had moved repeatedly from one part of Gaza to another to seek safety — were no longer sure where to go.
Khan Younis was the site of a major Israeli military ground operation in the spring aimed at dislodging Hamas’s military wing and destroying tunnels that Israel said Hamas had built. At that time, Israel also told residents to flee, and many went south to the city of Rafah on Gaza’s border with Egypt. Residents who returned to Khan Younis in April said that parts of the city had been so badly damaged as to be almost unrecognizable.
In a separate incident on Sunday, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, said that Israeli forces shot at a four-car U.N. convoy heading north to Gaza City, hitting one car five times, but causing no casualties.
Ms. Wateridge, who was in the vehicle that was hit, said that bullets had pierced the vehicle while it was stationary at a holding point in front of the Wadi Gaza checkpoint. She described the incident as terrifying and said she was fortunate to have been sitting in the front passenger seat away from where the bullets penetrated the car.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Key Developments
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on Yemen on Monday to discuss the recent exchange of strikes between Houthis and Israel, raising tensions that threaten to further destabilize the region. The meeting was called by the United States, France and Britain. Two senior U.N. officials condemned the Houthi drone strike on Tel Aviv on Friday and told the Council that Israel’s retaliatory strike on Saturday on the Yemeni port of Hudaydah had displaced some people living near the port, that fires were still burning and that the port was still functioning at limited capacity. Hudaydah is a lifeline for food and essential aid for millions of people in Yemen, and U.N. officials and other experts warn that more strikes on the port could have dire humanitarian consequences.
Israel will vaccinate its troops in Gaza against polio, its military said on Sunday, after the virus was detected in sewage samples there. The World Health Organization said last week that a poliovirus variant had been found in samples from Khan Younis in southern Gaza and Deir al Balah in central Gaza. Polio is a highly infectious disease that largely affects children under 5 and can cause paralysis. Though the W.H.O. has so far not reported any symptomatic polio cases in Gaza, the enclave has seen a rapid increase in diseases associated with population displacement, compromised hygiene and inadequate supplies of clean water, including diarrhea, acute respiratory infections, scabies, chickenpox and hepatitis A.
The daily average water supply in Gaza over the past two weeks has been just a quarter of what it was before the war, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on Monday. It added that the daily average supply of fuel that has entered Gaza this month has also been just a quarter of what aid groups need to sustain humanitarian operations and that the shortage has continued to hamper efforts to fight hunger. Two of four bakeries in Gaza City had to temporarily close last week because of the fuel shortages and fighting, and families without access to cooking gas are burning wood and plastic from furniture and waste to prepare food, the office said.
Washington is bracing for protests to coincide with Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit. A number of Jewish, Palestinian and other activist groups calling for a cease-fire in Gaza or a hostage deal are planning rallies on Capitol Hill and near the White House this week to coincide with the Israeli prime minister’s visit and speech to Congress on Wednesday. Some Democratic members of Congress have already said they will skip Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to show their unhappiness with his conduct of the war in Gaza, which Gazan authorities say has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians and which has created a severe hunger crisis in the enclave.
Israeli athletes will get 24-hour French police protection at the Paris Olympics amid heightened security concerns. Israeli athletes are targeted more than other delegations, Gerald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said in a television interview on Sunday, pledging to ensure that the team would feel welcome and could compete without fear. The announcement followed reports that a far-left French minister, Thomas Portes, said there should be protests against the Israeli athletes, citing the war in Gaza. Israeli news media has reported that some athletes have received threatening messages recalling the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, in which a Palestinian militant group, Black September, killed 11 Israelis.
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Vice President Kamala Harris has declined to preside on Wednesday when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is scheduled to address a joint meeting of Congress, staying away from a gathering that is likely to highlight the deep divisions among Democrats about his conduct of the war with Hamas.
An aide to Ms. Harris said her absence on Wednesday should not be construed as a change in her commitment to Israel’s security, but was merely a conflict with a previously scheduled event in Indianapolis. She is scheduled to speak at a convention of Zeta Phi Beta, one of the nation’s oldest Black sororities, and will meet with Mr. Netanyahu this week at the White House, the aide said.
Typically, the vice president, as the president of the Senate, sits on the House rostrum beside the House speaker during joint meetings to receive a foreign leader, appearing just behind the visiting dignitary in a tacit show of support and welcome. But this week, Democrats are turning instead to Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, to sit beside Speaker Mike Johnson and behind Mr. Netanyahu, according to two people familiar with the plans, who spoke about them on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Cardin, who is retiring from Congress, is strongly pro-Israel and has remained staunchly supportive of the Jewish state even as the Biden administration and many Democrats in Congress have clashed openly with Mr. Netanyahu over his policies and tactics in the war against Hamas.
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the president pro tempore, who is third in line to the presidency, also was asked to preside in Ms. Harris’s stead but declined. Ms. Murray is not planning to attend the speech at all, a spokesman said.
Other Democrats have said they plan to boycott the speech in protest of Mr. Netanyahu’s policies and Israel’s conduct of the war.
And Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, was not seen as an appropriate alternative; he delivered a speech earlier this year branding Mr. Netanyahu a major impediment to peace in the Middle East and calling for elections to replace him when the war winds down.
The Biden administration has clashed with Mr. Netanyahu over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the failure to ensure the delivery of aid to Palestinian civilians and the apparent lack of a plan for governance after the war.
Mr. Netanyahu was invited to address Congress by leaders from both parties. But it was Mr. Johnson who pressed to arrange the speech, seeking to hug Mr. Netanyahu closer as some Democrats, particularly progressives, were repudiating him and condemning his tactics in the war, which have caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and a humanitarian disaster for the 2.2 million Palestinians in the enclave.
Erica L. Green contributed reporting.
— Annie Karni Reporting from the Capitol
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The Israeli military said on Monday that two more people taken hostage on Oct. 7 had died in captivity in Gaza, as relatives of other captive Israelis were expected to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington ahead of a congressional address, pressing him to close a deal with Hamas that would lead to the return of their family members and an end to the war.
Mr. Netanyahu is slated to address Congress on Wednesday, following weeks of negotiations between mediators in Egypt and Qatar over the details of a cease-fire framework that he proposed and that was endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. Many relatives of the hostages, some of whom traveled to the United States for Mr. Netanyahu’s address, say he should not give a speech unless he can say the deal is done.
“We fully expect that his speech to Congress will be an acceptance,” Jon Polin, father of an Israeli-American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, said at a briefing with reporters in Washington on Monday.
“We know that many of our loved ones are in fragile condition,” Mr. Polin said.
Families of the hostages fear that time is running out for their relatives, a concern deepened by the Israeli announcement that two men taken during the Hamas-led attack on Israel have died.
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The military said that, based on intelligence reports, Yagev Buchshtab, 35, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nirim, and Alex Dancyg, abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, who would have turned 76 on Sunday, had been killed. Their bodies are being held by Hamas, Israel said. Mr. Buchshtab’s wife, Rimon, was also taken captive but was released as part of a hostage deal in November.
Hamas itself had announced in March that the two hostages were dead, and Israeli news media reports suggested that they may have been killed during military operations in Gaza.
“The circumstances of their death in Hamas captivity are being examined by all the professional authorities,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
Of the 120 remaining hostages in Gaza, 46 are now believed to be dead, according to the Hostage Families Forum, which represents relatives of the abductees.
“We expect from our prime minister to cease all stalling,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen, father of an Israeli-American hostage, Sagui Dekel-Chen, taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz, said in the briefing on Monday.
About 50 members of Kibbutz Nir Oz were taken hostage on Oct. 7 and about 35 remain in Gaza, Mr. Dekel-Chen noted, calling his kibbutz “ground zero” of the Hamas attack. He cited the announcement of Mr. Dancyg’s death as evidence of the urgent need to reach a deal.
Mr. Netanyahu, however, is under competing pressures. Some far-right members of his governing coalition want him to reject the cease-fire agreement on the table now, and he has reportedly added terms to it that mediators, including some Israelis involved in the talks, say Hamas will not agree to. On Monday, several religious leaders in the Religious Zionism Party said they were opposed to a hostage deal that would lead to the release of numerous Palestinians prisoners who might replenish the Hamas ranks.
The hostage families said they planned to lobby the prime minister in Washington to abandon “the fantasy that some better deal is coming,” as Mr. Dekel-Chen put it.
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