Israel keeps up its heavy assault on Khan Yunis, Gaza’s main southern city, killing more innocent Palestinians in its genocidal onslaught.
In their biggest operation in a month, Israeli tanks pushed through the city of Khan Younis, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering after leaving the north.
The Israeli military claims it has encircled the southern city and that its troops were intensifying operations "in the area of the Khan Yunis (refugee) camp."
The heavy Israeli bombardment of Gaza overnight has killed at least 210 people.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said three displaced individuals had been killed and two others wounded at the gate of its headquarters in Khan Yunis.
Martin Griffiths, the UN coordinator of emergency relief, said on Tuesday that 24 people had been killed in strikes on an aid warehouse, UN center and humanitarian zone in Khan Yunis area and that an aid distribution center had come under heavy bombardment.
Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra accused Israel of targeting Nasser Hospital, the largest medical facility still operating, saying attacks were blocking access for medics and patients and threatening to put it out of action.
"The occupation is placing the lives of medical teams, patients, the injured and the displaced in several hospitals in Khan Yunis in danger," he said.
Three hospitals, including Nasser, are in the areas ordered evacuated on Tuesday, the UN humanitarian office said.
Fresh evacuation orders
On Tuesday, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of an area that the United Nations humanitarian office said was inhabited by half a million people while also shutting off the road from the city towards the Mediterranean coast.
The road was the main escape route for civilians trying to reach Rafah on Gaza's southern edge bordering Egypt – already crammed with more than half the territory's 2.3 million people.
The office of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas decried the "dangerous demands" for residents to head south and warned that Israel intended to "displace the Palestinian people from their homeland, thus leading to unforeseeable consequences", according to the official news agency Wafa.
Hamas says the Israeli army has already forcibly displaced "tens of thousands" of people from Khan Yunis to Rafah, the city in south Gaza that abuts the Egyptian frontier.
‘Conditions worsening’
Palestinian health officials said at least 25,700 Gazans have been killed in the war, including 210 in the previous 24 hours, with thousands more feared lost under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
The war has led to dire shortages of food, water, fuel, and medicines in the besieged territory.
The World Food Programme (WFM) warned Tuesday that conditions in Gaza were worsening.
"More than half a million people in Gaza are facing catastrophic food insecurity levels and the risk of famine increases each day," said Abeer Etefa, the WFP's senior Middle East spokeswoman.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, decried Israeli officials' repeated rejection of calls for the creation of a Palestinian state as "unacceptable" in a speech to the Security Council, saying it "would indefinitely prolong" the conflict.
Israeli premiere under pressure
The cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under mounting pressure from the Israeli public to end the war, especially after 24 soldiers were killed Monday in the army's deadliest single day since it launched ground operations in Gaza.
The regime says 21 of them were reservists killed when Hamas resistance fighters targeted them with rocket-propelled grenade fire.
Citing Israeli officials, The New York Times said they died during an Israeli operation to demolish part of a Palestinian neighborhood in line with a plan to create a "buffer zone" inside Gaza along the border with the occupied territories.
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