Israeli forces retook the eastern part of Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, in a surprise raid that sent residents who had returned to their abandoned, now dilapidated homes fleeing again.
Elsewhere in Khan Younis, dozens of bodies were recovered from new mass graves found in the Gaza Strip, at the site of the city’s largest hospital abandoned by Israeli soldiers. Further south, there were new airstrikes in Rafah, the last refuge where more than half of the Palestinian enclave’s residents have gathered.
In April, Israel abruptly withdrew most of its ground forces from the southern Gaza Strip after some of the heaviest fighting in seven months. Residents began returning to the until recently deserted neighborhoods of the enclave’s second-largest city, only to find their homes in ruins and corpses in the streets.
“This morning, many families who had left in the previous two weeks to go to their homes in Abasan (a district in eastern Khan Yunis) returned here. People were terrified,” said Ahmed Rezik, 42, who has taken refuge in a school in the western part of Khan Yunis.
“They said tanks were advancing in the eastern sector, under heavy fire, and they ran to save themselves,” he told Reuters via an app.
Cruel images and mass graves at Nasser Hospital
In the ruins of the building that once housed Nasser Hospital, the largest in southern Gaza, Reuters reporters saw rescuers wearing white hazmat suits pulling bodies from the ground with a backhoe and hand tools. Emergency services said a further 73 bodies had been found at the scene, bringing the total to 283.
Israel claims it was forced to fight inside hospitals because Hamas men were operating from there, a claim denied by both Hamas and medical personnel.
According to Gaza authorities, the bodies found so far are from only one of at least three mass graves at Nasser Hospital.
“We expect to find another 200 bodies in the same mass grave in the next two days, and then we will start working on the other two cemeteries,” said Ismail Al Tawabta, the director of the Hamas government’s press office. He accused Israel of carrying out “executions” at the hospital and of covering up the crimes by burying the bodies with a bulldozer. Israel categorically denies that it carried out any executions.
The relatives of the victims come to collect the bodies of their loved ones to bury them. The family of Osama al-Subaghi, who was found dead on the hospital premises, first took the body to a cemetery to be buried next to his sister, to whom he had once donated one of his kidneys when she was ill.
“My daughter asked to visit her father’s grave. I told her that after we bury him, we will visit him. God willing. It’s tough, but maybe we’ll find some relief after we bury him,” said his wife, Sumaya. In one hand she held a handful of yellow flowers, in the other the small hand of her daughter, Hind, who wore a pale yellow jumpsuit with scenes from Disney’s Frozen to say goodbye to her father. “He loved me, bought me things and took me for walks,” said the little girl, next to the newly dug grave.
Gazans reported airstrikes in several other areas as well, including in Rafah, where the day before doctors performed an emergency caesarean section to save an infant whose mother was killed in the shelling.
In Nuseirat, central Gaza, officials said the shelling damaged solar panels that the local hospital relies on for electricity.
