Israeli forces deepened an operation in the Gaza Strip's largest city, sending thousands of Palestinians fleeing on Monday from an area already ravaged in the early weeks of the nine-month-long war.
The incursion into the eastern part of Gaza City expands Israel’s engagement in the northern part of the beleaguered territory, an area Israel said it had seized control of months ago yet which has seen pockets of militant resurgence that have scaled back Israeli military gains and drawn forces back into such operations. Israel had ordered evacuations in the area before the raid was launched, the military said.
Heavy fighting in the area in the initial weeks of the war all but emptied out Gaza City and its environs, and the Israeli military has prevented most people from returning to their homes there. But several hundred thousands of Palestinians remain in the area, living in the shells of their homes or shelters. The fresh fighting meant new displacement for many residents there.
While diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the war were ramping up, people in Gaza were seeing no end in sight to their suffering.
Residents fleeing eastern Gaza Strip neighborhoods early Monday said Israel was carrying out heavy strikes on the area, which prompted some Palestinians sheltering in neighborhoods that were not under evacuation orders to seek refuge elsewhere.
Fadel Naeem, the director of the Al-Ahli hospital said patients and their companions fled the facility in panic even though there was no specific evacuation for the area around the hospital. He said people had “left for fear of the worst,” adding that patients in critical condition had been evacuated to other hospitals in northern Gaza.
The Israeli military said it launched the operation after it received intelligence that showed the area was housing militants from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group as well as weapons and investigation and detention rooms. The military said a facility belonging to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, was also being used by the militants, without providing evidence.
It said in a statement it was mounting an operation against militant infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, and that it had taken out of action more than 30 fighters.
Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the Hamas-linked civil defense department, said the neighborhoods of Tufah, Daraj, Shijaiyah — the latter still enduring an Israeli incursion launched last month — had become inaccessible because of intense Israeli bombing.
In a voice message late Sunday, he said the Israeli military shelled residential houses in the Jaffa area of Gaza City, and that first responders “saw people lying on the ground and were not able to retrieve them because of the bombing.”
The Gaza Civil Emergency Service said it believed dozens of people were killed but emergency teams were unable to reach them because of ongoing offensives in Daraj and Tuffah in the east and Tel Al-Hawa, Sabra and Rimal further west.
