Israel bombarded towns in Gaza with airstrikes on Wednesday, killing dozens of Palestinians, as talks on securing a new truce and prisoner exchange with Hamas continue.
At least 46 people were killed and more than 100 injured after Israel bombed the Jabalia urban refugee camp near Gaza City, according to Munir al-Bursh, a senior Palestinian Health Ministry official.
In southern Gaza, several women and children were among those hospitalized at Nasser Hospital in the town of Khan Younis after the strikes.
Gaza’s health ministry also said at least 12 people were killed and dozens injured in a series of airstrikes in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
“Twelve martyrs and dozens of injured people, including women and children, were found under the rubble when a house and a mosque were targeted hundreds of meters from the Kuwaiti hospital,” the ministry said in a statement. communicated.
The Israeli military also ordered the immediate evacuation of an area covering about 20 percent of the central and southern city of Khan Younis, which before the Israeli invasion was home to more than 111,000 people and now includes 32 shelters sheltering more than 141,000 people displaced from northern Gaza by the war.
Israel’s notification of the forced relocation was announced online on Wednesday, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), with Palestinians instructed to move to the already crowded Rafah neighborhoods further south. south.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s top leader, Ismail Haniyeh, traveled to Cairo on Wednesday for talks on the Gaza war, amid a diplomatic whirlwind in hopes of securing another truce and a prisoner exchange agreement with Israel.
The two sides recently restarted indirect talks, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States.
More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its war on Gaza on October 7. Thousands more lie under the rubble of Gaza, the UN estimates.