Key Points
- Israeli forces have laid siege in Khan Younis near Nasser Hospital, the largest still functioning.
- Medecins Sans Frontieres says patients and displaced people fled in panic, with at least 16 dead.
- The US says there’s “no way” to solve Israel’s security challenges without the establishment of a Palestinian state.
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 Netanyau vowed “many more months” of fighting.
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.
A Palestinian man inspects his damaged home on the southern outskirts of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip. Source: Getty / AFP
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.
Israeli officials have accused Hamas fighters of operating from Nasser Hospital, which staff deny.
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”.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, which has doctors at the city’s Nasser Hospital, said 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.
United States stresses importance of ‘Palestinian state’
There is “no way” to solve Israel’s long-term security challenges in the region and the short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday.
Speaking at a news briefing, Miller said Israel has an opportunity right now as countries in the region are ready to provide security assurances to Israel.
“But there is no way to solve their long-term challenges to provide lasting security and there is no way to solve the short-term challenges of rebuilding Gaza and establishing governance in Gaza and providing security for Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he has told the US he opposes a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza. Source: AP / Abir Sultan
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he rejects the notion of a Palestinian state being established after the war.
Netanyahu said he had expressed this to the US, saying in a press conference on Thursday that Israel would only agree to a deal in which Israel gained security control of the Gaza Strip.
More than three months into a war that has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the Gaza Strip to rubble, Israel has said it is planning to wind down its ground operations and shift to smaller-scale tactics.
But before doing so, it appears determined to capture all of Khan Younis, the main southern city which it says is now the principal base for the Hamas fighters who stormed across the border on 7 October, killing 1,200 people and seizing 240 hostages.
The war between Hamas and Israel is the latest escalation in a long-standing conflict.
Hamas is a Palestinian political and military group, which has governed the Gaza Strip since the most recent elections in 2006.
Hamas’ stated aim is to establish a Palestinian state and stop the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, illegal under international law.
Hamas in its entirety is listed as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and seven other countries, including Australia.
In 2021 the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Palestinian territories dating back to 2014, including the recent attacks of both Israel and Hamas.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that, while Israel had already shifted to smaller scale operations in Gaza’s north, the fierce battle for Khan Younis was likely to rage on for up to two months.
Nearly all of the Gaza Strip’s population has now been penned into two small areas: Rafah just south of Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah just north of it.
Israel has given no indication of whether it intends to storm those towns but says it will not stop fighting until it has eradicated Hamas, an aim Palestinians say is unachievable given the group’s diffuse structure and deep roots.
Khan Younis residents said on Thursday the fighting had come within a whisker of Nasser Hospital, the biggest hospital still working in the enclave, which has been receiving hundreds of wounded patients a day, crammed into wards and treated on the floors since fighting shifted to the south last month.
Two-thirds of Gaza’s hospitals have now ceased functioning and losing Nasser would curtail the limited trauma care still available.
In a statement on Thursday, Hamas denied claims aired by released Israeli hostage Sharon Aloni in an interview on CNN that she and other prisoners had been detained in rooms in Nasser Hospital.
The group “considers this to be in line with the lies of Israel and its old and new incitement against hospitals to justify its destruction of them”.
MSF Head of Mission for Palestine Leo Cans, who reached Nasser Hospital, said fighting had come “very close”.
“The wounded people that we take care of, many of them lost their legs, lost their arms. There are really complex wounds that require a lot of surgery. And we don’t have the capacity to do this now.”
