Life and death in Gaza’s “safe zone,” where food is scarce and Israel strikes without warning

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip – An Israeli airstrike hit a residential building next to the main medical center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, wounding at least seven people, hospital authorities and witnesses said Wednesday.

Nasser Hospital is located in the western part of the city, which Israeli military maps show is in the Israeli-designated humanitarian “safe zone” where Palestinians are supposed to go. The latest Israeli evacuation order earlier this week affected around 250,000 people in large parts of Gaza, the United Nations estimated.

As dust from Wednesday’s attack swirled through a street near Nasser Hospital, an Associated Press employee filmed people running in all directions – some toward the destruction, others away. Men carried two boys who appeared to be injured. Later, civil defense rescue workers and passersby picked their way over chunks of cement and twisted metal, searching for people who might be buried.

Displaced families evicted from eastern Khan Younis on Monday are struggling to find shelter in overcrowded shelters and open fields in the west of the city. Wednesday’s airstrike hit an area that also houses a school that serves as accommodation for displaced people, many of whom are living in makeshift tents.

“There were three of us sitting in that tent and we were surprised by the rubble and the dust,” said one man, Jalal Lafi, who was displaced from the southern city of Rafah.

“The house was bombed without warning, two rockets hit the house one after the other,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at the rubble. His hair and clothes were covered in gray soot.

The Israeli military initially made no comment on the attack.

Andrea De Domenico, head of the UN humanitarian office for the Palestinian territories, said Gaza was “the only place in the world where people cannot find safe refuge and cannot leave the front line.” Even so-called safe areas are being bombed, he told reporters in Jerusalem on Wednesday.

An Israeli airstrike on Tuesday killed a well-known Palestinian doctor and eight members of his extended family, just hours after they complied with military orders to vacate their home and move to the Israeli-designated security zone.

Most Palestinians seeking safety go either to a coastal region called Muwasi or to the nearby town of Deir al-Balah, De Domenico said.

The Israeli military estimates that at least 1.8 million Palestinians are currently in the humanitarian zone it has declared, which stretches about 14 kilometers along the Mediterranean Sea. 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 waters contaminated by sewage.

Getting food to these areas at all is “a huge challenge,” De Domenico said. Although the UN is now able to meet basic needs in northern Gaza, getting aid to the south is very difficult, he said. Israel says it is allowing aid to enter southern Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing and accuses the UN of not doing enough to transport the aid.

According to the UN, fighting, military restrictions imposed by Israel and general chaos – including criminal gangs collecting aid from trucks in Gaza – have made it almost impossible for aid workers to collect the truckloads of supplies allowed in by Israel.

Since the start of Israel’s offensive in Rafah two months ago, the amount of food and other aid reaching Gaza has dropped dramatically, leading to widespread hunger and fuelling fears of famine.

“This is an unbearable life,” said Anwar Salman, a displaced Palestinian. “If they want to kill us, let them. Let them drop a nuclear bomb and destroy us. We are fed up. We are tired. We are dying every day.”

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Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Samy Magdy in Cairo and Drew Callister in New York contributed to this article.