May 18, 2024
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Crowds of Palestinian families stretching as far as the eye could see walked out of Gaza City and surrounding areas toward the south Thursday to escape the conflict between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in dense urban neighborhoods. Others joined tens of thousands taking shelter at the city's biggest hospital, not far from the fighting.
Gaza’s largest city is the focus of Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas following its deadly Oct. 7 incursion — and the Israeli military says Hamas’ main command center is located in and under the Shifa Hospital complex.
Growing numbers of people have been living in and around the hospital complex, hoping it will be safer than their homes or U.N. shelters in the north. Israeli troops were around 2 miles from the hospital, according to its director.
The accelerating exodus to the south came as Israel agreed to hold four-hour daily humanitarian pauses and to open a second route for people to flee the north, the White House said. The scope of the pauses was not immediately clear. The agreement came as Western and Arab officials gathered in Paris on Thursday to discuss ways of providing more aid to civilians in Gaza.
Separately, mediators worked on a possible deal for a three-day cease-fire in exchange for the release of around a dozen hostages held by Hamas, according to two Egyptian officials, a United Nations official and a Western diplomat.
International journalists who entered the north on a tour led by the Israeli military on Wednesday saw heavily damaged buildings, fields of rubble and toppled trees along the Mediterranean shoreline.
More than two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes since the war began, with hundreds of thousands heeding Israeli orders to flee to the southern part of the enclave.
Aid deliveries into Gaza from Egypt have reached an average of 100 trucks a day, the U.S. humanitarian envoy for the war David Satterfield said Thursday. Relief workers say that is still far below what is needed.
The exodus from Gaza City and surrounding areas in the north has picked up in recent days. The U.N. said 50,000 people fled south on Gaza's main highway Wednesday.
Similar-sized crowds streamed out on Thursday, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene as they arrived out of the northern zone.
The Hamas-run Interior Ministry, which has urged Palestinians to stay in their homes, has told news outlets not to circulate footage of people fleeing.
A month of relentless bombardment in Gaza since the Hamas attack has killed more than 10,800 Palestinians — according to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.
Israeli officials say thousands of Palestinian militants have been killed, and blame civilian deaths on Hamas, accusing it of operating in residential areas and using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Gaza’s Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its casualty reports.
More than 1,400 people have died in Israel since the start of the war, most of them civilians killed by Hamas militants during their initial incursion. Israel says 32 of its soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began.
Palestinian militants have continued to fire rockets into Israel, and some 250,000 Israelis have been forced to evacuate from communities near Gaza and along the northern border with Lebanon, where Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have traded fire repeatedly.
A drone exploded in the yard of a house in Israel’s Red Sea city of Eilat, causing no injuries, and a long-range surface-to-surface missile — whose source was under investigation — was intercepted before entering Israeli airspace, the military said. Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they fired a batch of missiles at Israel on Thursday, including toward Eilat — at least the fifth time the Iranian-backed force has tried to strike Israel.
