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 on Friday, after an Israeli operation to extract prisoners’ bodies from the area.

Recent “intensified hostilities” in the Khan Younis area 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 ordered the evacuation of parts of the southern city on Monday, announcing its forces would “forcefully operate” there, including in an area previously declared a safe humanitarian zone.

On Wednesday, Israel said five bodies of prisoners seized during Hamas’s October 7 raid 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, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said the prisoners’ 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.

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

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

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2024