Israel says more than 100,000 Palestinians have moved from the north to the south of Gaza over the past two days.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled northern Gaza on foot as Israeli forces push deeper into dense urban neighborhoods and attack hospitals where residents have taken refuge.
Gaza City has been at the center of Israel’s ground offensive, with heavy fighting and air raids reported Friday in densely populated areas.
An Israeli army spokesperson said Friday that more than 100,000 Palestinians have moved from the north to the south of Gaza over the past two days.
A steady stream of people, including many children, the injured and the elderly, were seen heading south, most on foot, carrying only small backpacks and essential belongings.
Israel has repeatedly targeted and attacked civilians heading south.
“Fighting in urban areas of the Gaza Strip has reached critical levels, as Israeli occupying forces advance and deepen,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Khan Younis.
“Now Israeli troops are stationed in the Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood, the Al-Shati refugee camp and even in the eastern areas of Gaza, as they attempt to infiltrate further into the center and the main centers of Gaza City. They are only one kilometer from Al-Shifa Hospital.
The UN humanitarian office said on Friday it was unable to deliver aid trucks to northern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people still reside.
“If there is hell on earth, it is northern Gaza,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told reporters in Geneva.
Also Friday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called for an investigation into what he called Israel’s use of “high-impact explosive weapons” in Gaza. He said the use of such weapons was causing indiscriminate destruction in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The UN said earlier this week that at least 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have fled their homes since the war began.
More than 11,000 Palestinians, including 4,506 children, have been killed in Gaza since Israel began shelling the enclave following the October 7 Hamas attack that Israel says killed more than 1,400 dead, mostly civilians.