Tag: Evacuations

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Aid workers struggled Monday to distribute dwindling food and other supplies to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by what Israel says is a limited military operation in Rafah, as the two main crossings near the southern Gaza city remained closed.

The United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees said 360,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah over the past week, out of 1.3 million who were sheltering there before the operation began. Most had already fled fighting elsewhere during the seven-month war between Israel and Hamas.

Israel has portrayed Rafah as the last stronghold of the militant group, brushing off warnings from the United States and other allies that any major operation there would be catastrophic for civilians. Hamas has meanwhile regrouped and is battling Israeli forces in parts of Gaza that Israel bombarded and invaded earlier in the war.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said Monday that another 100,000 Palestinians have been displaced in northern Gaza following recent Israeli evacuation orders there. That would mean that around a fifth of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced over the past week.

Thirty-eight trucks of flour arrived through the western Erez Crossing, a second access point to northern Gaza, said Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Program. Israel announced the crossing’s opening Sunday.

But no food has entered the two main crossings in southern Gaza for the past week.

The Rafah crossing into Egypt has been closed since Israeli troops seized it a week ago. Fighting in Rafah city has made it impossible for aid groups to access the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, though Israel says it is allowing supply trucks to enter from its side.

For the past week, the Israeli military has intensified bombardment and other operations in Rafah while ordering the population to evacuate from parts of the city. Israel insists it is a limited operation focused on rooting out tunnels and other militant infrastructure along the border with Egypt.

Israeli forces were also battling Palestinian militants in Zeitoun and the urban Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, areas where the army had launched major operations earlier in the war.

Etefa said WFP was distributing food from its remaining stocks in the areas of Khan Younis in the south and Deir al-Balah farther north, where many of those escaping Rafah have fled.

Inside Rafah, only two organizations partnering with WFP were still able to distribute food, and no bakeries were operating.

“The majority of distributions have stopped due to the evacuation orders, displacement and running out of food,” she said.

Israeli protesters halted a convoy of aid bound for Gaza at a checkpoint between the occupied West Bank and Israel. Videos circulating online showed them hurling some of the aid off trucks and destroying it. Police said a number of arrests were made, without elaborating.

Almost the entire population of Gaza relies on humanitarian aid to survive. Israeli restrictions and ongoing fighting have hindered humanitarian efforts, causing widespread hunger and a “full-blown famine” in the north, according to the U.N.

The director of the Kuwait Hospital, one of the last functioning medical centers in Rafah, said medical staff and residents living near the facility have been told to evacuate. Sohaib al-Hams warned that any evacuation of the hospital itself would have “catastrophic consequences.”

The international charity Oxfam, meanwhile, warned of disease outbreaks in Gaza following an estimated $210 million worth of damage to water and sanitation infrastructure, mass displacement and the onset of summer.

“Oxfam staff in Gaza have described piles of human waste and rivers of sewage in the streets, which people are having to jump between. They also reported people having to drink dirty water and children being bitten by insects swarming around the sewage,” it said in a statement.

The war began when Hamas and other militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking another 250 hostage. Militants still hold about 100 captives and the remains of more than 30 after most of the rest were released during a cease-fire last year.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its figures. Israel says it has killed over 13,000 militants, without providing evidence.

Israel marked an especially somber Memorial Day on Monday, with ceremonies commemorating fallen soldiers, including the more than 600 killed since Oct. 7, more than half of them in the initial attack. Sirens announced two minutes of silence at 11 a.m.

At a ceremony at Mount Herzl cemetery on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed once again to defeat Hamas.

“We exacted and will exact a high price from the enemy for their criminal acts. We will realize the goals of victory and at the center of them the return of all our hostages,” he said.

Protesters and hecklers interrupted some of the ceremonies, reflecting growing discontent with Israel’s leaders that has brought thousands of protesters into the streets in recent months. Critics blame Netanyahu for the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to happen and for the failure to reach a deal with Hamas to release the hostages.

Months of internationally mediated talks over a cease-fire and hostage release ground to an apparent standstill last week after Israel launched its incursion into Rafah. Israel has refused Hamas’ central demands for an end to the war and the withdrawal of its forces from the territory, saying that doing so would allow the militant group to regain control and launch more Oct. 7-style attacks.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, which has provided crucial military and diplomatic support for the overall offensive, has expressed growing impatience with Israel, saying it won’t supply offensive arms for a full-scale Rafah assault.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Sunday that Israel could face an “enduring insurgency” if it doesn’t come up with a realistic plan for postwar governance in Gaza. Israel has rejected U.S. proposals for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza with help from Arab states because those plans depend on progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state, which Netanyahu opposes.

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Krauss reported from Jerusalem and Magdy from Cairo. Associated Press writers Lee Keath in Cairo, Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem and Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel — For four years, Sivan Shoshani Partush recruited families for Kibbutz Malkiya, a community of around 400 that she calls her “little slice of heaven.” It wasn’t a hard sell: spacious homes, beautiful nature, paths winding through manicured lawns, and a slower pace of life than in Israel’s frantic cities.

The border with Lebanon is just 200 meters (650 feet) away. Partush would pass it on her daily runs, a feature of the landscape just like the view of the snow-topped Hermon Mountain in the winter.

“There was fear, but I got over it, because that’s the choice I made, because someone was protecting me,” said Partush. “But now there’s a feeling that no one is protecting us.”

Among approximately 60,000 Israelis evacuated from northern Israel after months of cross-border fighting, Partush and her children are staying temporarily in another kibbutz, and she isn’t sure if she wants to return to Malkiya. Nearly 91,000 people from south Lebanon have also been displaced.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group began launching rockets towards Israel one day after Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostage. More than 31,000 people have been killed in Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. There has been near-daily violence along the Lebanon-Israel border and international mediators are scrambling to prevent an all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel.

The fighting has killed eight civilians and 11 soldiers in Israel. More than 200 Hezbollah fighters and about 40 civilians have died in Lebanon.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said the Israeli military is concentrating on Gaza, but that Israel has a simple aim in Lebanon: to push Hezbollah away from the border, either by diplomacy or force.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

Israel said it has targeted 4,500 Hezbollah sites in the past five months. But Hezbollah’s well-stocked and deeply entrenched militants continue to launch rockets, and Israel said the militants have attempted to or have actually crossed the border half a dozen times.

Partush is grimly resigned to the reality that it may be a year before she can return home, if she ever goes back, and she struggles to explain what would make her feel safe in the post-Oct. 7 world. The reality of living next to Lebanon has irrevocably changed, she said.

“They need to create a security belt, we need to have an Israeli army presence always, and they need to strengthen the emergency squads so not even a mouse can pass through the border,” she said.

Some in her kibbutz are doubtful about returning, and it’s hurting their tight-knit community, said Partush.

“We want to go home, but on the other hand, where will we go? It’s very scary,” she said.

Many Israelis who evacuated from the Gaza border after the Hamas attack have returned home in recent weeks. Those from the hardest-hit kibbutzim are moving to semi-permanent housing while their homes are rebuilt.

In Sderot, the largest city near Gaza with some 30,000 residents, life is starting to return to normal. Schools reopened this month. City streets, deserted in the early days of the war, are bustling again. Stores and cafes are doing brisk business, even as the conflict continues just a few kilometers away.

Some 30,000 displaced Israelis are living in hotel rooms across the country as the war enters its sixth month, according to the Prime Minister’s Office. Others have moved to rented apartments or are staying with family.

From their cramped hotel rooms, evacuees from Israel’s north have been watching news reports showing Sderot’s residents return home with mixed feelings, aware their journey is far from over.

Israelis who have grown up under the shadow of rockets from Lebanon no longer find it tolerable.

“I don’t want my daughters to grow up like I did,” said Michal Nidam, a high school counselor from Kiryat Shmona, the largest city in Israel’s north, which has suffered rocket fire from Lebanon for decades. “I have had anxiety since I was little. I used to sleep with my fingers in my ears, under the bed, and many times I slept with shoes and clothes on.”

After the Hamas attack, Nidam and her children bounced between rented apartments for a few months and they now live in a hotel in Tiberias. Her two teenage daughters have one room, while her two youngest daughters stay with her in another crammed with clothes, snacks and their small dog.

Some families are struggling with the transitory living arrangements. Bored teenagers are tempted by drugs, alcohol and other acts of rebellion, while their parents are overwhelmed with the challenges of evacuation, Nidam said. The city of Kiryat Shmona has employed her to serve as a trusted adult presence in the lobby in the evenings, talking with the teens and making sure their parents are kept in the loop about their comings and goings.

Another challenge: “Families have been broken up,” Nidam said.

Nidam’s mother is in Jerusalem, while her 85-year-old father refuses to leave the city and — wearing army fatigues — volunteers for an emergency preparedness squad. Nidam’s husband and some of her brothers also remained to serve as emergency personnel. Other displaced siblings are spread across the country.

Despite the violence, the city of Kiryat Shmona says an estimated 3,000 residents stayed — either through choice or because they perform essential roles. Drivers now steer empty buses down deserted streets in the former northern economic hub. A hardware store is among a handful of shops still open.

Haim Menus, 70, a baker who was wounded in 1998 while serving as a tank driver during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, said he will not leave and that he trusts God to protect him. His hours at the bakery have been slashed because they have so few customers, and he tries not to spend too much time outside in case a siren warns of incoming rockets.

Menus said his neighbors want to return but that fear keeps them away.

“Who doesn’t want to return to his family, his home, the children, schools, kindergartens?” he asked, just moments after a siren wailed and he dashed inside the hardware store for shelter. “But it’s dangerous.”

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KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Israel’s military on Sunday ordered more areas in and around Gaza’s second-largest city of Khan Younis to evacuate, as it shifted its offensive to the southern half of the territory where it says many Hamas leaders are hiding.

Heavy bombardments were reported overnight and into Sunday in the area of Khan Younis and the southern city of Rafah, as well as parts of the north that had been the focus of Israel’s blistering air and ground campaign.

Many of the territory’s 2.3 million people are crammed in the south after Israeli forces ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the 2-month-old war.

With the resumption of fighting, hopes receded that another temporary truce could be negotiated. A weeklong cease-fire, which expired Friday, had facilitated the release of dozens of Gaza-held Israeli and foreign hostages and Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

“We will continue the war until we achieve all its goals, and it’s impossible to achieve those goals without the ground operation,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address Saturday night.

On Sunday, the Israeli military widened evacuation orders in and around Khan Younis, asking residents of at least five more areas and neighborhoods to leave for their safety.

Residents said the Israeli military dropped leaflets ordering them to move south to Rafah or to a coastal area in the southwest. “Khan Younis city is a dangerous combat zone,” the leaflets read.

The main hospital in Khan Younis received at least three dead and dozens wounded Sunday morning from an Israeli strike that hit a residential building in the eastern part of the city, according to an Associated Press journalist at the hospital.

Separately, the bodies of 31 people who were killed in Israeli bombardment across the central areas of the strip were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Gaza’s central city of Deir al-Balah, said Omar al-Darawi, an administrative employee at that hospital.

AP video showed bodies in white body bags on the ground outside the hospital in Deri al-Balah as dozens of people held funeral prayers Sunday morning. The bodies were then taken on a truck for burial.

One woman wept, cradling the body of a child on her lap as she sat on a chair. Another adult carried the body of a baby as he got into a truck.

U.N. monitors said in a report issued before the latest evacuation orders that those who were told to leave make up about one-quarter of the territory of Gaza — home to nearly 800,000 people before the war.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally, has warned Israel to avoid significant new mass displacement.

The Israeli military said Sunday that its fighter jets and helicopters “struck terror targets in the Gaza Strip, including terror tunnel shafts, command centers and weapons storage facilities” overnight, while a drone killed five Hamas fighters.

In northern Gaza, rescue teams with little equipment scrambled Sunday to dig through the rubble of buildings in the Jabaliya refugee camp and other neighborhoods in Gaza City in search for potential survivors and dead bodies.

“They strike everywhere,” said Amal Radwan, a woman sheltering in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp. “There is the non-stop sound of explosions around us.”

Mohamed Abu Abed, who lives in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City, also said there were relentless airstrikes and shelling in his neighborhood and surrounding areas.

“The situation here is imaginable,” he said. “Death is everywhere. One can die in a flash.”

The Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza said Saturday that the overall death toll in the strip since the Oct. 7 start of the war had surpassed 15,200, a sharp jump from the previous count of more than 13,300 on Nov. 20. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but it said 70% of the dead were women and children. It said more than 40,000 people had been wounded since the war began.

U.S. appeals to protect civilians came after an offensive in the first weeks of the war devastated large areas of northern Gaza. Much of Gaza’s population is packed into the territory’s southern half. The territory itself, bordering Israel and Egypt to the south, is sealed, leaving residents with the only option of moving around within Gaza to avoid the bombings.

“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating,” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters Saturday during the COP28 climate conference in Dubai.

Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Netanyahu, said Israel was making “maximum effort” to protect civilians and the military has used leaflets, phone calls, and radio and TV broadcasts to urge Gazans to move from specific areas. He added that Israel is considering creating a security buffer zone that would not allow Gazans direct access to the border fence on foot.

Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighborhoods. It claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence. Israel says at least 78 of its soldiers have been killed in the offensive in northern Gaza.

Bombardments on Saturday destroyed a block of about 50 residential buildings in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City and a six-story building in the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya on the northern edge of the city, said the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

More than 60 people were killed in the Shijaiyah strikes and more than 300 buried under the rubble, the monitors said, citing the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense, said rescuers lack bulldozers and other equipment to reach those buried under the rubble, confirming the Red Crescent estimate of about 300 people missing. He said the block had housed over 1,000 people.

“Retrieving the martyrs is extremely difficult,” he said in video comments from the site of the attack.

Meanwhile, Harris told Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in a meeting that “under no circumstances” would the U.S. permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, an ongoing siege of Gaza or the redrawing of its borders, according to a U.S. summary.

The war was sparked by an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and other militants that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel. Around 240 people were taken captive.

The renewed hostilities have heightened concerns for 137 hostages, who the Israeli military says are still being held after 105 were freed during the recent truce. Israel freed 240 Palestinians during the truce. Most of those released by both sides were women and children.

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Magdy reported from Cairo and Becatoros from Athens. Associated Press writer Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel contributed to this report.