Israel orders evacuations as it widens offensive but Palestinians are running out of places to go

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel renewed calls Monday for mass evacuations from the southern town of Khan Younis, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks, as the military widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the Gaza Strip.

The expanded assault posed a deadly choice for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — either stay in the path of Israeli forces or flee to squeeze into progressively tinier slivers of the Gaza Strip, with no guarantee of safety.

Aid workers warned that the mass movement would worsen the already dire humanitarian catastrophe in the territory.

"Another wave of displacement is underway, and the humanitarian situation worsens by the hour," the Gaza chief of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Thomas White, said in a post on X.

Israel has vowed to eliminate Gaza's Hamas rulers, whose October 7 attack into Israel triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of the territory's population of 2.3 million people.

Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas — if that's possible, given the group's deep roots in Palestinian society — before any new cease-fire.

But the mounting toll, which Palestinian health officials say has killed several hundred civilians since a weeklong truce ended Friday, is likely to further increase international pressure to return to the negotiating table.

It could also render even larger parts of the isolated territory uninhabitable.

Airstrikes and the ground offensive have transformed much of the north, including large areas in Gaza City, into a rubble-filled wasteland.

Hundreds of thousands of residents fled south during the assault. Now around two million people — most of the territory's population — are crowded into the 230 square kilometres that make up south and central Gaza, where Israel's ground offensive is expanding. Their only escape is to other parts of that area, as both Israel and neighbouring Egypt have refused to accept any refugees.

Follow The Gleaner on X and Instagram @JamaicaGleaner and on Facebook @GleanerJamaica. Send us a message on WhatsApp at 1-876-499-0169 or email us at onlinefeedback@gleanerjm.com or editors@gleanerjm.com.