Battle of Khan Younis threatens biggest hospital still functioning in Gaza

Israeli forces advanced into the southern Gaza Strip’s main city on Thursday, pounding areas near the enclave’s biggest functioning hospital, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed “many more months” of fighting until total victory is achieved.

The heaviest battle of the year was under way in Khan Younis, sheltering hundreds of thousands of people who fled the north earlier in the war, now in its fourth month.

Residents described heavy fighting and intense bombardment in the north and east of the city and, for the first time, in the west, where they said tanks had advanced to carry out a raid before withdrawing.

Khan Younis residents said on Thursday the fighting had come within a whisker of Nasser Hospital, the biggest hospital still working in the enclave. It has been receiving hundreds of wounded patients a day, crammed into wards and treated on the floors since the fighting shifted to the south last month.

“What is happening in Khan Younis now is complete madness: the occupation bombards the city in all directions, from the air and the ground too,” said Abu El-Abed, 45, now living in Khan Younis after being displaced several times with his family of seven since leaving Gaza City in the north earlier in the war.

Israeli officials have accused Hamas fighters of operating from Nasser Hospital, which staff deny.

In an update on progress, Netanyahu said the Israel Defense Forces had destroyed “16 or 17” out of 24 of Hamas’ organised combat regiments, adding the next step would be “clearing the territory” of militants.

“The first action is usually shorter, the second usually takes longer,” Netanyahu said at a news briefing.

“Victory will take many more months but we are determined to achieve it.”

The Israeli military said a brigade in Khan Younis, now operating further south than troops had ventured before, had “eliminated dozens of terrorists in close-quarters combat and with the assistance of tank fire and air support”. It said it had killed 60 fighters in the previous 24 hours, including 40 in Khan Younis.

The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which has doctors at the city’s Nasser Hospital, said patients and displaced people sheltering there were fleeing in panic.

In Rafah, further south, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are now crammed into a small city by the Egyptian border, 16 bodies were laid out on the bloodstained cobbles outside a morgue, most in white shrouds, a few in body bags.

A branch of the Zameli family had been wiped out in a strike that destroyed their home overnight. Half the bundles were tiny, holding the bodies of small children. A grey-haired man howled in sorrow as he clung to one of the bodies, burying his face in the face of the shrouded corpse. A woman in a pink headscarf keened and stroked one of the shrouds.

At the scene of the bombing, a tattered schoolbag lay in the rubble. Tears rolled down the cheeks of 10-year-old cousin Mahmoud al-Zameli, who lived next door and had escaped.

“Yesterday, I was playing with the children over there. They have all died,” he sobbed. “I’m the only one still alive.”