Israel has issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate west out of the line of fire and closer to humanitarian aid in the latest indication that it plans to attack Hamas in southern Gaza after subduing the north.
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"We're asking people to relocate," Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC on Friday.
"I know it's not easy for many of them but we don't want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire."
Such a move could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to relocate again, along with residents of the southern city of Khan Younis, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.
Khan Younis has a population of more than 400,000.
Israel vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip following an October 7 rampage into Israel in which its fighters killed 1200 people and dragged 240 hostages into the enclave.
Since then, Israel has bombed much of Gaza City to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the entire northern half of the enclave and left homeless about two-thirds of the strip's 2.3 million Palestinians.
Many of those who have fled fear their displacement could become permanent.
Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Friday to more than 12,000 people, 5000 of them children - figures the United Nations deems credible.
Regev said Israeli Defence Forces would have to advance into Khan Younis to oust Hamas fighters from underground tunnels and bunkers, but that no such "enormous infrastructure" existed in less built-up areas to the west.
"I'm pretty sure that they won't have to move again" if they move west, he said.
With the war entering its seventh week, there was no sign of any let-up despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least humanitarian pauses.
"We have prepared ourselves for a long and sustained defence from all directions," Abu Ubaida, Hamas' armed wing spokesman, said in a video statement.
Fresh violence flared in the occupied West Bank, with at least five Palestinians killed and two injured in an Israeli strike on a building in the Balata refugee camp in the central city of Nablus, the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said early on Saturday.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Israel said on Friday it would allow two truckloads of fuel a day into Gaza at the request of Washington to help the UN meet basic needs and spoke of plans to increase aid more broadly.
UN agencies say humanitarian conditions in Gaza are rapidly deteriorating and the World Food Program has warned of the "immediate possibility of starvation".
The White House said in a post on X that it was "glad" that Israel had agreed to the fuel deliveries and that they should "continue on a regular basis and in larger quantities".
At Gaza's biggest hospital, Al Shifa, Israel said its forces had found a vehicle with a large number of weapons and an underground structure it called a Hamas tunnel shaft.
Israel maintains the hospital sits above a vast underground bunker housing a Hamas command headquarters, claims hospital staff say are false.
Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes but says some hostages have received treatment at medical centres.
Al Shifa staff said a premature baby died at the hospital on Friday, the first baby to die there in the two days since Israeli forces entered.
Three had died in the previous days while the hospital was surrounded.
Hamas also announced the death of a captive from Israel, an 85-year-old it said died of a panic attack during an air strike.
In Modiin, Israel, family held a funeral for Noa Marciano, 19, an Israeli army conscript whose body was recovered from Gaza City near Shifa hospital on Thursday.
She had been abducted from a military base during the Hamas onslaught.
The military said it had also recovered the body of Yehudit Weiss, 65, a mother of five who was seized from Kibbutz Be'eri.
with DPA
Australian Associated Press
