Attack kills family as Israeli evacuation order triggers panicked flight from southern Gaza City

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip – The Hamdan family – about a dozen people from three generations – fled their home in the middle of the night after the Israeli military ordered an evacuation from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

They found refuge with relatives in a building further north, inside an Israeli-declared safe zone. But hours after their arrival, an Israeli airstrike hit their building in the town of Deir al-Balah on Tuesday afternoon, killing nine family members and three others.

According to hospital records and a surviving relative, the dead included a total of five children and three women.

Israel’s order on Monday for residents to leave the eastern part of Khan Younis, the territory’s second-largest city, triggered the third mass exodus of Palestinians in months, plunging the population into even deeper confusion, chaos and misery as they once again struggle desperately for safety.

According to the United Nations, the area affected by the order is home to about 250,000 people, many of whom had just returned to their homes after fleeing the Israeli invasion of Khan Younis earlier this year – or had sought refuge there after escaping the Israeli offensive in the town of Rafah further south.

The order also sparked a panicked exodus from the European General Hospital, Gaza’s second-largest hospital, which is in the evacuation area. The facility was closed after staff and more than 200 patients were evacuated overnight and on Tuesday, along with thousands of displaced people who had taken shelter on hospital grounds, according to staff and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had a medical team on site.

Hisham Mhanna, ICRC spokesman in Gaza, said some families had dragged patients in their hospital beds for up to 10 kilometers through the streets to reach safety. Ambulances took others to other locations while staff rushed to remove valuable equipment, including X-ray and ultrasound machines and endoscopy equipment, which are now in such short supply, said nurse Muhammad Younis.

Hours after the evacuation order, the Israeli military said the hospital was not affected by the order, but staff said they feared a repeat of previous Israeli attacks on other hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

“Many hospitals lie in ruins and have become battlefields or cemeteries,” Mhanna said.

Israel has raided hospitals, claiming Hamas is using them for military purposes. Gaza medical officials deny this claim.

Cars full of belongings streamed out of eastern Khan Younis on Tuesday, but the number of refugees was not immediately known. The new exodus adds to the 1 million people who have fled Rafah since May, as well as the tens of thousands displaced in the past week by a new Israeli offensive in the Shijaiyah district of northern Gaza.

“We left everything behind,” said Munir Hamza, a father of three who fled his home in an eastern district of Khan Younis for the second time on Monday evening. “We are tired of moving and being displaced. … This is unbearable.”

Nowhere safe

Up to 15 members of the Hamdan family fled their home in Khan Younis and arrived at their extended family’s building in Deir al-Balah late Monday, said Asmaa Salim, a relative who lived in the building.

The building was located within the expanded humanitarian zone that the Israeli military declared at the start of its offensive in Rafah in May and called on Palestinians to evacuate there for safety reasons.

The attack occurred around 3 p.m. on Tuesday. An Associated Press video shows an entire floor of the building destroyed. “Almost everyone in the building has become a martyr, only two or three survived,” Salim told the AP.

According to a list of the dead posted at the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital, those killed were the head of the family, 62-year-old dermatologist Hossam Hamdan, his wife and their adult son and daughter. Four of their grandchildren, aged three to five, and the mother of two of the children were also killed. A man and his five-year-old son who lived in the building and a man on the street outside were also killed in the attack, which injured 10 other people, including several children.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the attack.

Flight from Khan Younis

Monday’s evacuation order suggested that a new ground assault on Khan Younis could be imminent, although there were no immediate signs of that. Israeli forces waged a months-long offensive there earlier this year, battling Hamas militias and leaving large parts of the southern city destroyed or badly damaged.

Israel has repeatedly returned to parts of Gaza it previously occupied to root out militants it says have regrouped, a sign that Hamas remains viable after nearly nine months of war in Gaza.

According to the Health Ministry, more than 37,900 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip during the Israeli offensive, most of them women and children. The ministry does not distinguish between fighters and Palestinians in its counts. Israel launched its offensive after the Hamas attack on October 7, in which militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostage in southern Israel.

The Israeli military estimates that there are currently about 1.8 million Palestinians in the humanitarian zone it has declared, which stretches about 14 kilometers along Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. Much of the area is now dotted with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical care and have limited access to aid, the UN and humanitarian organizations say. Families live among piles of garbage and sewage-polluted waterways.

The amount of food and other aid entering Gaza has plummeted since the Rafah offensive began. The UN says that fighting, Israeli military restrictions and general chaos – including the looting of trucks by criminal gangs in Gaza – make it almost impossible to pick up truckloads of goods that Israel has allowed into the country. As a result, cargo piles up right in Gaza at the main Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel near Rafah, where it goes unclaimed.

The Norwegian Refugee Council said last week it had conducted a survey of nearly 1,100 families who had fled Rafah, and 83 percent of them said they had no access to food and more than half had no access to clean water.

On Tuesday, more families fleeing Khan Younis tried to find space in the zone. Um Abdel-Rahman said she and her family of four children – the youngest is three years old – walked for hours at night to reach the zone but could not find a place to stay.

“There is no room for anyone,” she said. “We are waiting and there is nothing we can do but wait.”

Noha al-Bana said she had been displaced four times since fleeing Gaza City in the north at the start of the war.

“We have been humiliated,” she said. “No proper food, no proper water, no proper bathrooms, no proper place to sleep. … Fear, fear, fear. There is no safety. No safety at home, no safety in the tents.”

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Magdy and Keath reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.