GAZA- Israel ordered Palestinians to leave parts of the main southern city in the Gaza Strip on Monday even as its bombs rained down on areas where it had told them to go.
Intense air raids overnight meanwhile killed more than 100 Palestinians raising the death toll in Gaza since Saturday to more than 800.
Israel’s military posted a map on social media platform X on Monday morning with around a quarter of the city of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated at once.
Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and towards Rafah, near the Egyptian border.
Melanie Ward, chief executive of the humanitarian organization Medical Aid for Palestinians, said, “I cannot overstate the fear, panic and confusion that these Israeli maps are causing civilians in Gaza, including my own staff. People cannot run from place to place to try to escape Israel’s bombs, nor does international law expect them to.”
Desperate Gazans in Khan Younis packed their belongings and headed towards Rafah. Most were on foot, walking past ruined buildings in a solemn and silent procession.
But Rafah itself was coming under Israeli fire. The head of the United Nations agency in Gaza (UNWRA), Thomas White, said people there were themselves being forced to flee.
“People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them,” he said on X.
Bombing at one site in Rafah overnight had torn a crater the size of a basketball court out of the earth. A dead toddler’s bare feet and black trousers poked out from under a pile of rubble. Men struggled with their bare hands to move a chunk of the concrete that had crushed the child.
Later they chanted “God is greatest” and wept as they marched through the ruins carrying the body in a bundle, and that of another small child body wrapped in a blanket.
“We were asleep and safe, they told us it was a safe area, Rafah and all,” said Salah al-Arja, owner of one of the houses destroyed at the site.
“There were children, women and martyrs,” he said. “They tell you it is a safe area, but there is no safe area in all of the Gaza Strip, it is all lies and manipulations.”
Gaza’s health ministry said on Monday that at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children, have now been killed in ferocious Israeli air and artillery bombings on the enclave since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing and feared buried under rubble.
As many as 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes in the Israeli bombing campaign that has reduced much of the crowded coastal strip to a desolate wasteland.
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