By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Ramadan Abed
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip/CAIRO (Reuters) – Israeli troops responded in an eastern part of Khan Younis in a surprise raid, residents said on Monday, sending people who had returned to their abandoned homes into the ruins of the southern Gaza Strip. the main city fled once again.
Elsewhere in Khan Younis, dozens more bodies were found in what Palestinian authorities said were mass graves at the site of the city’s main hospital, abandoned by Israeli troops. Further south, airstrikes took place on Rafah, the last refuge where more than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants have sought refuge.
Israel abruptly withdrew most of its ground troops from the southern Gaza Strip this month, after some of the heaviest fighting in the seven-month war. Residents began returning to previously inaccessible neighborhoods of what was once the enclave’s second-largest city, finding homes reduced to ruins and the dead unfound in the streets.
“This morning, many families who had left here in the last two weeks to return home to Abassan came back. They were too scared,” Ahmed Rezik, 42, told Reuters from school where he took refuge in the western part of Khan Younis. , referring to an eastern district.
“They said the tanks advanced into the eastern area of the city under heavy fire and they had to flee for their lives,” he told Reuters via a chat app.
Israel launched its war in Gaza after fighters from the Islamist militant group Hamas which rules the enclave burst through the border fence on October 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Israel responded by launching a ground attack on Gaza, promising to wipe out Hamas. Since then, more than 34,000 people have been confirmed killed, according to Gaza health authorities, and thousands more bodies may be lost in the rubble.
“THE SCENE IS HARD”
In the ruins of what was once the Nasser hospital, the largest in southern Gaza, Reuters saw rescuers in white hazmat suits digging up corpses with hand tools and an excavator truck. Emergency services said a further 73 bodies had been discovered at the site over the past day, bringing the number of people found over the week to 283.
Israel claims it was forced to fight inside hospitals because Hamas fighters were operating there, something medical staff and Hamas deny.
Gaza authorities say the bodies found so far come from just one of three mass graves they found at the site.
“We expect to find 200 more bodies in the same mass grave over the next two days before we start working in the other two cemeteries,” Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas government media office, told Reuters.
He accused Israel of carrying out hospital “executions” and covering up the crimes by burying the bodies with a bulldozer. Israel strongly denies carrying out executions.
Relatives came to take their loved ones to be reburied. Family members on Monday brought the body of Osama al-Shoubagy, one of the bodies found on the hospital grounds, to a cemetery to be reburied next to his sister, to whom he had once donated a kidney when she was ill.
“My young daughter asked me to visit her father’s grave. I would tell her that as soon as we have buried him, we will visit him. Thank God. The scene is difficult, but we might find some relief after the “to have buried”, says his wife Soumaya.
In one hand, she held some yellow flowers, in the other, that of their little daughter Hind, who wore a pale yellow Disney “Frozen” tracksuit to say goodbye to her father.
“He loved me (and used) to buy things for me, and he would take me outside,” said the little girl next to the new grave.
Gazans reported airstrikes in several other areas, including in Rafah, where the day before doctors performed a cesarean section to save a baby from its mother’s womb, who was among those killed.
In Nusseirat in central Gaza, officials said an airstrike damaged the solar panels on which the hospital’s electricity depends.
(Writing by Peter Graff; editing by Sharon Singleton)
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