Families flee new Israeli assault in Gaza’s Khan Younis

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By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Hatem Khaled

CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) -Israeli tanks returned to the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Friday, forcing families to evacuate along congested roadways, as Palestinian fighters continued to attack Israeli troops from the ruins, residents and the military said.

Israeli planes carried out strikes across the enclave on Friday, killing at least 35 Palestinians, the Gaza health ministry said.

Thousands of people fled eastern Khan Younis in vehicles and on foot, belongings heaped on donkey carts and motorcycle rickshaws as they made their slow escape along congested roads.

With Israel and Lebanon braced for a possible escalation in fighting, leaders from the United States, Egypt and Qatar tried to revive efforts to halt the fighting in Gaza, scheduling a new round of talks for Aug. 15.

In recent weeks Israeli forces which swept into nearly the entire Gaza Strip over more than ten months of war have been returning to the ruins of areas where they said they had defeated Hamas fighters, while warning that they might regroup.

In the latest assault, the military dropped leaflets ordering residents and displaced people sheltering in eastern Khan Younis, Gaza’s main southern city, to evacuate from an area that has already seen repeated waves of fighting.

Families packed into buses and cars, many seeking shelter in Al-Mawasi, a sandy stretch of ground along the coast, though some expressed fear over attacks there even though it is designated as a safe zone by Israeli forces.

Um Raed Abu Elyan said she and her family were “running from the fire, we are running with our children from fear”.

Asked where would she go she replied: “God knows, we are walking now. They said to go to humanitarian areas, but there is no safe place here in Gaza. It is all destroyed and damaged.”

Later on Friday, an Israeli air strike killed six Palestinians in Al-Mawasi, medics said. Another strike on a house nearby killed four people, including a girl, and wounded several others, they added.

Among the dead were two local journalists, Tamim Abu Muaamar and Abdallah Al-Susi, along with several of their relatives, medics and fellow journalists said. Their deaths brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli fire to 168 since Oct 7, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.

The Israeli military said troops hit dozens of Hamas targets in Khan Younis and Rafah close to the Egyptian border, seizing arms depots, destroying infrastructure and killing dozens of fighters armed with weapons including rocket propelled grenades.

CEASEFIRE TALKS

The meeting called for Aug. 15 to discuss a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal follows previous talks that have failed to yield a ceasefire since a single week-long truce last November.

Israel’s prime minister’s office said a delegation would be sent to the talks but declined to give further details. A Hamas official told Reuters the group was “studying” the new offer for talks, refusing to elaborate. The newly appointed overall leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, is believed to run the battle, possibly from the tunnels of Gaza.

In a statement, the Hamas armed wing vowed loyalty to Sinwar in a show of challenge to Israel, which puts Sinwar on the top of its marked-for-death officials.

Fears are growing of a possible broader conflict. Iran has vowed to retaliate after Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran and Israel killed a top commander of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in a strike on a Beirut suburb.

A Hamas response to the latest proposal for talks “needs to be studied carefully with its allies. If Israel was serious about reaching a ceasefire, they could have simply accepted the proposal Hamas agreed to,” said one Palestinian official familiar with the mediation effort.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza aiming to wipe out Hamas after the group’s fighters attacked Israeli towns on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing more than 250 hostages according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Israel has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to figures from health officials in the enclave, who say thousands of others are feared dead under the rubble.

Israel says it has killed or incapacitated more than 14,000 Hamas fighters, roughly half the number it estimated it faced at the start of the war.

Palestinians say that despite the near total devastation of Gaza, Hamas fighters remain able to mount guerrilla attacks and ambushes even as Israel prepares for war on a possible second front on the Lebanese border.

(Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Hatem Khaled in GazaEditing by Peter Graff, Philippa Fletcher and Diane Craft)