180,000 Displaced In Four Days

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 says, 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” had been displaced from central and eastern Khan Yunis between Monday and Thursday, and hundreds were “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 claimed its forces had “eliminated approximately 100 terrorists” in the city this week.

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