Israeli airstrikes unrelenting in Gaza 9 weeks after outbreak of war with Hamas

Israel ordered residents out of the centre of Gaza’s main southern city, Khan Younis, on Saturday and pounded the length of the Hamas-run enclave the day after the United States wielded its UN Security Council veto to shield its ally from a demand for a ceasefire.

Since a truce collapsed last week, Israel has expanded its ground campaign into the southern half of the Gaza Strip by pushing into Khan Younis. Simultaneously, both sides have reported a surge in fighting in the north.

On Saturday, Israeli national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said Israeli forces had killed at least 7,000 Hamas militants during the ongoing war, without saying how that estimate was reached, and military chief Lieut.-Gen. Herzi Halevi told soldiers that “we need to press harder.”

Israel’s Arabic-language spokesperson posted a map on X, formerly Twitter, highlighting six numbered blocks of Khan Younis that residents were told to evacuate “urgently.” They included parts of the city centre that had not been subject to such orders before.

Israel issued similar warnings before storming eastern parts of the city, and residents said they feared new evacuation orders heralded a further assault.

“It might be a matter of time before they act against our area too. We have been hearing bombing all night,” said 57-year-old Zainab Khalil, who was displaced with 30 of her relatives and friends in Khan Younis near Jalal Street where troops told people to leave.

“We don’t sleep at night. We stay awake, we try to put the children to sleep and we stay up fearing the place would be bombed and we’ll have to run carrying the children out. During the day begins another tragedy, and that is: How to feed the children?”

In central Gaza, Israeli tank shelling resumed on Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps, local residents said. According to Palestinian health officials, seven Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Bureij. Israeli forces could not immediately be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, with food and medical supplies also scarce, a senior United Nations World Food Program official said a new system was being tested to bring aid into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, potentially allowing imports to ramp up. However, Israel has not yet agreed to open the crossing.

At the Rafah crossing with Egypt some 100 trucks carrying aid entered Gaza on Saturday, said Wael Abu Omar, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Crossings Authority. That is still well below the daily average before the war.

The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have already been forced from their homes, many fleeing several times. With fighting raging across the territory, residents and UN agencies say there is now effectively nowhere safe to go, although Israel disputes this.

Death toll mounts

In Khan Younis, the dead and wounded arrived through the night at the overwhelmed Nasser Hospital.

A medic ran out of an ambulance with the limp body of a small girl in a pink tracksuit. Inside, wounded children wailed and writhed on the tile floor as nurses raced to comfort them. Outside, bodies were lined up in white shrouds.

Nasser and another southern hospital, Al-Aqsa in Deir al-Balah, reported 133 dead and 259 wounded between them in the past 24 hours, raising the Palestinian death toll to more than 17,700 with many thousands more missing and presumed dead, according to Health Ministry officials in Hamas-run Gaza.

Medical workers in northern Gaza, where some of the heaviest fighting is taking place, accused Israel of targeting hospitals and ambulances.

Asked for comment on Palestinian accounts of attacks on medical facilities, a spokesperson for the Israeli military said it followed international law and takes “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”

The military has previously said Hamas operates from medical facilities, releasing footage to support that claim. Hamas has denied doing so.

Israel says 93 Israeli soldiers have died in the ground offensive after Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 raid in Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and resulted in 240 being taken hostage.

Hamas said on Saturday that it continued its rocket fire into Israel.

Outside of Khan Younis, Gaza residents reported airstrikes and shelling in the north and south, including the city of Rafah near the Egyptian border — one area where the Israeli army had ordered civilians to evacuate to.

In northern Gaza, Israel has been trying to secure the military’s hold, despite heavy resistance from Hamas. It claims soldiers found weapons inside a school in Shijaia in a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza City and, in a separate incident, militants shot at troops from a UN-run school in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.

Calls for ceasefire get louder

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Washington’s veto at the United Nations on Friday to reject a vote by 13 of the Security Council’s 15 members backing a humanitarian ceasefire resolution, saying: “Israel will continue our just war to eliminate Hamas.”

U.S. vetoes UN Security Council vote on Israel-Hamas ceasefire

The U.S. has vetoed an emergency resolution at the UN Security Council — triggered by the secretary general with a rarely used power to force a vote — for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and to allow more aid into the area.

Four European Union countries want the bloc to debate the Gaza situation and call for a ceasefire when EU leaders meet next week.

Washington has said it told Israel to do more to fulfil promises it made to protect civilians in the next phase of the war. But the White House still backs Israel’s position that a ceasefire would benefit Hamas, and on Saturday the Biden administration bypassed the U.S. Congress to approve an emergency sale of ammunition to Israel.

“We do not support this resolution’s call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war,” Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told the Security Council on Friday.

Ezzat El-Reshiq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, condemned the U.S. veto as “inhumane.” Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority that lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, said the veto made the U.S. complicit in Israeli war crimes.

Mark Regev, an adviser to Netanyahu, said on Fox News on Saturday that a ceasefire would leave Hamas in charge.

“That just takes us back to Oct. 6,” he said, adding the group needed to be finished “once and for all.”