Anika Begay
By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Ramadan Abed
CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) – At least 17 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli attack on the Gaza town of Zawayda on Saturday, health officials said, as Israel issued fresh evacuation orders, citing Hamas rocket fire nearby.
According to health officials in the Hamas-administered enclave, most of those killed were from the same family, including eight children and four women.
The Israeli military said it was aware of reports of the attack and was investigating.
“They were sleeping in their beds, children and babies, then three missiles targeted their house,” said Abu Ahmed Hassan, a neighbor. The owner of the house was a well-known merchant, he said. “There is no military activity here,” he added.
On Saturday, the Israeli military spokesman in Arabic published on X instructions for the population of some central areas of Gaza, including the Maghazi district near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.
He claimed that militants were launching rockets from those positions and that the army was preparing to take action against them.
Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether those there had received instructions from the military. Residents said thousands were moving out of Maghazi.
On Friday, two areas of the southern city of Khan Younis, inside what Israel has designated a humanitarian zone, were deemed unsafe by the army, which ordered people to evacuate them, saying militants had regularly fired rockets from there.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also include other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, affected some 170,000 displaced people.
“This is one of the largest evacuation orders ever to be issued in the area, reducing the size of the so-called ‘humanitarian area’ to approximately 41 square kilometers, or 11 percent of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” an OCHA report said.
In the central part of the enclave, residents said that on Saturday Israeli tanks further advanced into eastern Deir Al-Balah, an area they had never invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have taken refuge.
The Israeli military said its forces had killed dozens of militants since Friday, including some who had fired rockets from the central and southern Gaza Strip.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced by Israel’s ongoing 10-month offensive, which has devastated much of the enclave.
CEASEFIRE TALKS SUSPENDED
Ceasefire talks in Doha, brokered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, broke down on Friday; negotiators will meet again next week to try to reach a deal that would end the fighting between Israel and Hamas and free the remaining hostages.
US President Joe Biden said on Friday that no party in the Middle East should hinder efforts to reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal that he said were now within sight, while warning that negotiations were “far from over”.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri responded that rumors of a close deal were “misleading claims.”
The war broke out on October 7, when the Islamist militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli counts.
Israel’s subsequent military campaign killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials. Israel lost 330 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian deaths were combatants.
