According to the United Nations, about 150,000 Palestinians are being forced to flee areas in central Gaza, as Israeli forces advance toward refugee camps.
Witnesses and the military wing of Hamas reported that tanks had reached the eastern outskirts of the Bureij camp.
The Israeli army recently expanded its ground offensive against Bureij and the neighboring camps Nuseirat and Maghazi. Israeli bombing also killed dozens of people in Gaza on Thursday, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said.
Egypt confirmed it had put forward a three-phase proposal to end the fighting, ending with a ceasefire. A Hamas delegation is said to have arrived in Cairo to give feedback on the project.
The war was sparked by an unprecedented cross-border attack by Hamas gunmen into southern Israel on October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed – mostly civilians – and about 240 others were captured hostage.
According to the Health Ministry, more than 21,300 people have been killed in Gaza – mostly children and women – in 11 weeks of fighting.
The Israeli military called for the evacuation of the strip stretching across central Gaza, including the Bureij and Nuseirat camps, and ordered nearly 90,000 residents and 61,000 displaced people from affected areas to move south to the town of Deir al-Balah.
However, the United Nations warned on Thursday that they had nowhere to go because Deir al-Balah was overcrowded, with hundreds of thousands of displaced people sheltering there.
The United Nations says Rafah – which has become Gaza’s most populous city – has welcomed about 100,000 new arrivals in recent days as Israeli ground forces move into new residential areas. Omar, 60, said he was forced to leave Bureij with at least 35 family members.
“This moment has come, I wish it never happened, but it seems this move is necessary,” he told Reuters news agency by phone. “Now we are in a tent in Deir al-Balah because of Israel’s brutal war.
” Tom White, Gaza director for the UN humanitarian agency UNRWA, said more and more people were being pushed towards the town of Rafah in southern Gaza, “so there are more and more people in a very small strip of land. ” cannot meet their needs.
On Thursday night, Gaza’s Health Ministry announced that 20 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a building in Rafah that appeared to house displaced civilians.
On Thursday morning, a ministry spokesman announced that 50 people were killed in Israeli attacks in Maghazi, the northern town of Beit Lahia and the southern town of Khan Younis.
The deadliest incident occurred in Beit Lahia, where Palestinian media reported 30 people were killed in the demolition of a block of four buildings.
A local television journalist, Bassel Kheir al-Din, told the Associated Press that 12 members of his family were buried under the rubble of one of the buildings and were presumed dead, leaving nine remaining. Their neighbors are missing.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said 10 people were killed when Israeli artillery shelled an apartment near al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, a day after a similar incident outside the facility left 31 people died.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters on Wednesday that the city is “a major terrorist center for Hamas”.
He also said the army fought in the Bureij region for the third day, adding that they “killed many terrorists and destroyed terrorist infrastructure”.
Residents told Reuters that heavy fighting continued on Thursday, with Israeli tanks advancing towards the densely populated Bureij camp from the north and east.
Hamas released a video showing what it said was its warplanes targeting Israeli soldiers and vehicles.
Elsewhere, the IDF said it regretted the “damage to unrelated civilians” caused by an airstrike in Maghazi on Sunday that killed at least 70 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Their statement said that the fighters “attacked two adjacent targets where Hamas members were present. ” In Israel, thousands of teenagers participated in marches demanding a new agreement to return more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.
Many protesters came from communities hardest hit by the October 7 attacks. “I come from Kibbutz Kfar Aza,” Shiri Khiyali told the BBC.
“I was there on October 7. My people were kidnapped. We want them back. We want them back now. ” Separately, United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk issued a fresh appeal calling on Israel to end what he called “illegal” killings in the occupied West Bank.
A report says the United Nations has verified the killing of 300 Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli forces and Israeli settlers since October 7.
A spokesman for the Israeli prime minister called the report ridiculous and said it downplayed major threats to Israel’s security.