by Israeli forces advanced further into southern Gaza’s largest city on Wednesday, surrounding two major hospitals where thousands of people sought safety as an attack on a United Nations shelter killed at least nine people, according to U.N. officials and local health officials.
The Israeli military said it had “currently ruled out” that its aerial or artillery fire had been responsible for the attack on the shelter in Khan Younis, where the UN was sheltering about 800 people. In addition to the nine dead, another 75 people were injured, according to Tomás Blancowho helps oversee UN aid operations in Gaza.
U.N. officials did not directly blame Israel but said the shelter, at a vocational training center, had been hit by two tank shots. Israel is the only fighter in Gaza that has tanks.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the U.N. Palestinian aid agency, said the shelter was “clearly marked” as a UN facility and that its coordinates had been shared with Israeli authorities. “Once again, a blatant disregard for the basic rules of war,” Mr. Lazzarini wrote on social networks.
At a news conference in Washington, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel called the strike “incredibly worrying,” adding: “Civilians must be protected and the protected nature of UN facilities must be respected.” He declined to say whether American officials had spoken to the Israelis about the attack on the shelters.
The Israeli military said it was carrying out a review of its operations in the shelter area.
The Israeli military, which described Khan Younis as a stronghold of Hamas, the militant group that led the October 7 attack on Israel, says its forces have surrounded the city after weeks of intense shelling and shooting. On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers surrounded two major hospitals where thousands of Gazans sought safety.
In a statement, the Israeli military accused Hamas of exploiting the civilian population and said its operation in Khan Younis would continue until it had finished “dismantling Hamas’s military framework and its strongholds.”
Thousands of civilians now at risk in Khan Younis had fled there to escape airstrikes and shelling in northern Gaza earlier in the war, crowding into shelters and tents on the streets. Some say that nowhere in the city is safe.
“Our last night in Khan Younis was like doomsday,” Gazan Yafa Abu Aker said Wednesday morning after walking about five miles from a refugee camp in the city to Rafah, near the border with Egypt. That city is also filled with people who have been forced to leave their homes.
In Khan Younis, Abu Aker said, she and others sought refuge in areas that the Israeli military had designated as safe zones, only to witness violent clashes, military planes flying overhead, bombs falling, shelling from tanks and gunfire.
“If we had stayed,” he said, “we would have been buried under the rubble.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli army orderly evacuations from parts of the city that include two hospitals, Nasser, the largest in southern Gaza, and Al-Amal. They are among the last hospitals in Gaza still offering limited medical care.
Aid organizations and local officials said both hospitals were under siege. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which runs Al-Amal, reported “heavy shelling” nearby and said an attack had killed three people outside its offices and in a nearby building. Israeli troops were “surrounding” Red Crescent workers and “imposing movement restrictions” around the group’s offices and hospital, he said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the Nasser Hospital had been isolated for all practical purposes by “continuous shelling,” preventing the wounded from reaching it and blocking the transfer of patients to a nearby Jordanian field hospital. The field hospital was also included in an evacuation zone, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office said. said Tuesday.
The three hospitals, with a total of more than 600 beds, represent one-fifth of the remaining functional hospital capacity in Gaza, according to the UN. He said the evacuation area was home to 88,000 residents and about 425,000 displaced people, grouped into about 1.5 squares. miles.
Doctors Without Borders, the aid group, saying Tuesday night that his staff members at Nasser could hear bombs and heavy gunfire, and that 850 patients and thousands of people sheltered there could not leave because the roads from the hospital were inaccessible or too dangerous. The group said it was “deeply concerned” for people’s safety.
The Israeli military has said mortar shots were fired at its troops from the hospital. The claim could not be independently verified.
The attack on the shelter was just the latest to hit a UN facility. The organization says 237 of its buildings have been hit during the war, including 150 belonging to its Palestinian aid agency.
U.N. officials said the death toll from Wednesday’s attack was likely to rise.
Hanan Al-Reifi, who was staying at the shelter, said “many people” had been killed and injured. He said emergency services had not responded to calls for help and people in the shelter did not have fire extinguishers.
The attack is likely to further fuel accusations that, despite pressure from the Biden administration and others, the Israeli military has not done enough to protect civilians in its campaign to crush Hamas.
Israel launched its offensive after Hamas led the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials. Since then, more than 25,000 people have died in Gaza, local health officials say, and most of the territory’s 2.2 million people have been forced to leave their homes.
The report was contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Victoria Kim, Farnaz Fassihi and Anushka Patil.
