Gaza’s civil defence agency said Saturday an Israeli strike hit a school in Gaza City, killing 90-100 people, while the Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas command centre.

“Forty martyrs and dozens wounded after the Israeli bombing of the Al-Taba’een school in the Al-Sahaba area in Gaza City,” agency spokesman Mahmoud Basal said in a post on Telegram.

Basal described the incident as “a horrific massacre”, with some bodies catching fire.

“The crews are trying to control the fire to retrieve the bodies of the martyrs and rescue the wounded,” he said.

Israel’s army said Saturday it had “precisely struck Hamas terrorists operating within a Hamas command and control center embedded in the Al-Taba’een school”.

On Thursday, the agency said Israeli strikes had hit two schools in Gaza City, killing more than 18 people.

The Israeli military said at the time it had struck Hamas command centres.

The war in Gaza began with Hamas’s October 7 attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Palestinian operatives seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 39 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,699 people, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.

Israel has vowed to destroy the Palestinian group in retaliation for its October attack, but during 10 months of war across the Gaza Strip, the military has found itself returning to some areas to fight the militants again.

Israel’s military on Friday said troops were operating around Khan Yunis, the southern Gaza city from which soldiers had withdrawn in April after months of fierce fighting with Hamas.

After the military issued an evacuation order for parts of Khan Yunis, AFPTV images showed a crowd of people flowing through dusty, damaged streets on foot or on donkeys and motorcycle carts piled with belongings.

By Friday, the United Nations Humanitarian Office OCHA estimated that “at least 60,000 Palestinians may have moved towards western Khan Yunis in the past 72 hours”, said UN spokeswoman Florencia Soto Nino.

The Gaza war has already pulled in Iran-aligned groups in the region, and fears of a broader Middle East war have surged following vows of vengeance for the killing of two senior militants, including Hamas’s political leader.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

By dusk, the streets of Khan Yunis stood completely deserted and eerily quiet. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Crowds fleeing Khan Yunis after an Israeli evacuation order gave way to empty streets on Friday as Palestinian residents tried to escape a new Israeli military operation in Gaza’s main southern area.

“They threw leaflets at us, ordering us to evacuate”, Reem Abu Hayya told AFP, referring to the flyers that Israeli forces drop from planes to order the evacuation of areas ahead of a military operation.

The Khan Yunis area had already seen evacuation orders in late July, and heavy fighting that devastated the area earlier this year.

“We don’t know where we’re going, and we have sick and disabled people with us. Where can we go?” Reem Abu Hayya asked AFP as she stood on the street in front of a building reduced to a pile of rebar and broken concrete.

In a besieged territory that has been consistently bombed over the past 10 months and where supplies enter with great difficulty, people carried all they could as they fled on Thursday.

AFP journalists saw one young man carrying planks of wood loosely tied in bundles, to be used as shelter structure or fuel in the near future.

With petrol scarce, only the most fortunate drove, often with mattresses piled high on the car roof. The vast majority walked. They carried their belongings in plastic and garbage bags, on donkey-puled carts, bikes, strollers or wheelchairs.

By dusk, the streets of Khan Yunis stood completely deserted and eerily quiet, AFP journalists reported. Only the ruins of buildings damaged in earlier strikes still stood.

The flyers dropped Thursday ordered residents to leave eastern towns of Khan Yunis governorate including Al-Salqa, Al-Qarara, Bani Suheila, and neighbourhoods in the city of Khan Yunis.

“Hamas and terrorist organisations continue to launch rockets from your areas”, read the flyers which echoed past orders and warned that the Israeli army “will act forcefully against these elements”.

Late last month Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the United Nations agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, said on social media site X that only “14% of areas in Gaza” were not subject to evacuation orders.

On Friday, the military said it launched a new operation in Khan Yunis following “intelligence indicating the presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure” there.

“The troops are engaging in combat both above and below-ground to eliminate terrorists in the area while locating and dismantling weaponry and terrorist infrastructure,” the military said in a statement.

– ‘We are exhausted’ –

The military has often returned to Gaza to areas where it had previously completed major operations against Palestinian militants, only to find them resurfacing or to act on intelligence about the location of hostages.

“Enough! For both, the Jews and Hamas! Both of them should look at the people of Gaza, have mercy on us for God’s sake,” Ahmed al-Najjar, angry at the war and the prospect of yet another displacement, told AFP.

War in Gaza began when Hamas Palestinian militants on October 7 attacked southern Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 39,699 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry of the Hamas-run territory, which does not provide details of civilian and militant deaths.

Mohammad al-Farra, from Sheikh Nasser in the east of Khan Yunis, also expressed frustration at the several displacements his family has lived through.

“We were the first to return to our home… as soon as the military operation in our area ended, to escape the heat, the displacement, and the hardship”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

“Then the occupation returned to drive us out again, making us suffer the tragedy multiple times over”, he said, referring to Israel. “We are exhausted. The war must end immediately so that we can feel human again, even just a little”.

Khan Yunis:

More than 180,000 Palestinians have fled fierce fighting around the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis in four days, the United Nations said Friday, after an Israeli operation to extract captives’ bodies from the area.

Recent “intensified hostilities” in the Khan Yunis area, more than nine months into the Israel-Hamas war, have fuelled “new waves of internal displacement across Gaza”, said the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA.

It said “about 182,000 people” have been displaced from central and eastern Khan Yunis between Monday and Thursday, and hundreds are “stranded in eastern Khan Yunis”.

The Israeli military on Monday ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern city, announcing its forces would “forcefully operate” there, including in an area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.

On Wednesday, Israel said five bodies of captives seized during Hamas’s October 7 attack that triggered the war had been recovered from the area.

Israel’s military said on Friday that its forces had “eliminated approximately 100 terrorists” in the city this week.

Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said the captives’ bodies were pulled from underground tunnels and walls in “a hidden place”.

Troops “were near those fallen bodies in the past, we did not know how to reach them” until this week, Halevi said in a statement.

Witnesses and rescuers said heavy battles continued around eastern Khan Yunis on Friday. The Nasser Hospital said 26 bodies were brought to the medical site.

The October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Out of 251 people taken hostage that day, 111 are still held in the Gaza Strip, including 39 the military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 39,175 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

According to UN figures, the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once by the fighting.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)