An Israeli airstrike hit a residential building next to the main medical center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing at least seven people, hospital officials and witnesses said.
As dust from Wednesday’s strikes rose on a street near Nasser Hospital, people ran in all directions, some toward the rubble, others away from it. Later, civil defense first responders and passersby picked their way through pieces of cement and twisted metal, searching for people who might have been buried.
Nasser Hospital is located in the western part of the city. Khan Younis, Rafah and al-Mawasi, in the south of the enclave, have been the target of repeated attacks, all previously designated as “humanitarian security zones” by Israel.
The Israeli military’s evacuation order this week for Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest city, affected about 250,000 people, according to the United Nations.
Displaced families ordered to leave eastern Khan Younis are struggling to find a place to live in crowded shelters and open areas in western parts of the city. Wednesday’s airstrike hit an area that also includes a school converted into a shelter for the displaced, many of whom are living in makeshift tents.
“We were sitting in this tent, three people, and we were surprised by the rubble and the dust,” said Jalal Lafi, a displaced person from Rafah.
“The house was bombed without warning, hit by two missiles in a row, one after the other,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the rubble, his hair and clothes covered in gray soot.
Andrea De Domenico, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territories, said Gaza was “the only place in the world where people cannot find safe haven and cannot leave the front line.” Even in so-called safe areas, there is shelling, he told reporters on Wednesday.
An Israeli airstrike killed a prominent Palestinian doctor and eight members of his extended family on Tuesday, hours after they complied with military orders to evacuate their home and move to the Israeli-designated security zone.
The European Hospital in Khan Younis was put out of service after Israeli forces shelled several areas and medical staff were forced to evacuate patients and move what remained of devices and equipment, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
Gaza’s health ministry said only 15 of 36 hospitals were now partially operational.
De Domenico said: “At present, we estimate that nine out of ten people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, and unfortunately up to ten times, since October.”
He said 1.9 million people have been “repeatedly displaced internally.”
The amount of food and other supplies arriving in Gaza has plummeted since the start of the Israeli offensive on Rafah two months ago, sparking widespread hunger and fears of famine.
“This is an unbearable life,” said Anwar Salman, a displaced Palestinian. “If they want to kill us, let them do it. Let them drop a nuclear bomb and finish us off. We’ve had enough. We’re tired. We’re dying every day.”