About 180 people were killed as a result of the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip

At the beginning of the Gaza War in October, the Israeli army’s focus was on the northern Gaza Strip, claiming that it was the Hamas movement’s command center and main stronghold. But last week, the Israeli bombing expanded to the south of the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli destruction machine continues to destroy the city of Khan Yunis unabated.

The intense fighting in and around Khan Yunis led to the displacement of tens of thousands in the Gaza Strip, with more than 80 percent of its population having already fled their homes, and the war also cut off most supplies of food, water, and other vital aid.

At the beginning of the war, when Israeli aircraft began bombing areas in northern Gaza, and Israeli forces prepared for a ground incursion, the Israeli army distributed messages urging civilians to move to the south of the Strip for their safety.

Despite the dangers of the journey, and severe overcrowding in shelters and private homes, hundreds of thousands followed those orders. The United Nations said that about 1.6 million people were displaced towards the south, or more than two-thirds of Gaza’s population.

As Israel expanded its ground operations south, the displaced were asked to move again to a smaller area along the coast known as the Al-Mawasi area, located south of the Strip.

The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that it had registered 234,000 displaced people in Khan Yunis since the Israeli ground invasion of the north, and a number of them reside in temporary camps, while the rest are distributed in United Nations and UNRWA schools and government shelters, but they are not sufficient to accommodate these people. .

Now, amid Israeli bombardment, the southern city of Khan Yunis, the second-largest urban center in the Strip, is being portrayed as a Hamas stronghold as Israeli tanks move into an area already crowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

Why did you betray Yunus?

Several Israeli reports indicate that there is a strong belief among Israeli military leaders that Hamas leaders are present in areas of southern Gaza, especially in Khan Yunis and Rafah, and that this may have been the main reason behind expanding the scope of military operations to target areas of southern Gaza, according to what the network reported. BBC”.

Israel failed in the north, so it headed south

However, Palestinian analysts saw, according to the network, that Israel was seeking to achieve success in southern Gaza after its failure in the north, which was clear in the absence of any evidence that Hamas leaders were residing beneath the Shifa Hospital that Israel targeted and it was unable to find. A trace of Hamas leaders beneath it.

Sinwar stronghold

While Gaza City is the roots of the Hamas movement, especially in the Beach refugee camp, Khan Yunis has long been associated with the leader of the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, Yahya al-Sinwar, and its mysterious military commander, Muhammad Deif, whom Israel considers the mastermind of the October 7 attack. The first), as they both grew up in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, where Al-Sanwar was born in 1962, according to The Guardian.

The goal of the expanded operation in the south, senior IDF officers said publicly, was to capture or kill Sinwar and other members of the high command.

“We are attacking the center of gravity,” Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevy said on Tuesday. We are frequently asked about the devastation in Gaza. Hamas is the title, Sinwar is the title.”

“If Israel can say we killed Sinwar, we killed Muhammad Deif, then this is a very clear, symbolic and fundamental achievement,” Michael Eisenstadt, director of military and security studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week.

Hostages

However, Halevy also made clear that the IDF and the Israeli political leadership see expanding the operation to the south – contrary to complaints from some families of hostages held by Hamas – as a way to pressure Hamas to return to negotiations over the remaining 138 hostages.

Demographics of Khan Yunis

South Gaza is historically one of the most socially conservative areas of the coastal strip, and Hamas has long enjoyed support there.

While the IDF says it has killed many Hamas leaders, the group’s senior leadership has so far avoided this fate, according to the newspaper.

Khan Yunis is 10 kilometers from the Egyptian border, and is the largest governorate in terms of area (108 km), covering an area larger than Gaza City. It is the second largest city in the Gaza Strip in terms of population.

Khan Yunis Governorate was home to about 400,000 people, 70 percent of whom were distributed in urban areas, about 13 percent in the countryside, while about 17 percent lived in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. That was before the conflict swelled its population.

While there are tall buildings in Gaza City, the skyline of Khan Yunis is lower, surrounded on one side by a rural perimeter of villages that extend to the border with Israel – places like Khuza’a – and which have survived almost all the conflict since 2008, according to the Guardian. .

The bombing of Khan Yunis will continue, and there are fears of displacement

In an interview with Axios, a senior Israeli defense official stated that the Israeli army needs between three and four weeks to complete its current attack in Khan Yunis. He said that while America did not give Israel a deadline to end its military operations in Gaza, Washington expressed that time was running out.

According to the BBC, observers expressed fears that Israel would return to its plan that has been talked about since the outbreak of the conflict and related to the forced displacement of the Palestinians of Gaza to neighboring countries such as Egypt and Jordan, believing that making Gaza an unsafe place and pursuing its residents from north to south will make them focus on The border with Egypt, which will put great pressure on Egypt in light of talk about the possibility of Israel putting pressure on West Bank residents to deport them to Jordan.