Strike kills nine in Khan Younis hours after Israel ordered mass evacuation

Palestinian health officials say an Israeli strike has killed at least nine people in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

The overnight strike came after Israel ordered the evacuation of parts of the city on Monday ahead of a likely ground operation.

Records at Nasser Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken, show that three children and two women were among those killed.

Associated Press reporters at the hospital counted the bodies.

The strike hit a home near the European Hospital, which is inside the zone that Israel said should be evacuated.

After the initial evacuation orders, the military said the facility itself was not included, but its director says most patients and medics have already been relocated.

The military said it launched retaliatory strikes after Palestinian militants fired a barrage of some 20 projectiles into Israel from Khan Younis on Monday.

There were no reports of casualties or damage from the rocket attack.

Later on Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike hit a building in the town of Deir al-Balah, killing nine members of one family and three others.

In all, five children and three women were among the dead, according to hospital records and a relative who survived.

The main United Nations agency providing aid in Gaza says the latest evacuation orders apply to some 250,000 people, many of whom have already been displaced.

That is more than 10% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million.

About 250,000 people live in the latest mass-evacuation zone ordered by Israel, UNRWA official says.

Meanwhile, the mother of a well-known Israeli hostage who was freed from captivity in Gaza in a recent rescue operation has died, the Ichilov Hospital said in a brief statement on Tuesday.

Liora Argamani, 61, who had Stage 4 brain cancer, had pleaded for the release of her daughter, Noa, saying she wanted to see her only child before she died.

Noa Argamani, who became a well-known hostage after a video from the October 7 Hamas attack showed her being forced onto a motorbike and shouting at her captors not to kill her, was freed along with three other hostages in early June in an Israeli military operation in central Gaza.

Palestinian health officials said at least 274 Palestinians were killed.

The two were reunited but Yaakov Argamani, Noa’s father, said Liora was in a “very difficult situation” and barely registered seeing her daughter.

Hamas took around 250 hostages in its surprise attack into Israel and is still holding around 120 after most of the rest were released during a ceasefire in November.

Around a third of those still held are believed to be dead.

Some 1,200 people were killed in the attack.

Israel’s ongoing offensive, launched in response, has killed at least 37,900 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their count.

Palestinian health officials say four Palestinians were killed by an Israeli airstrike in a refugee camp in the northern West Bank late Tuesday.

Israel’s military said an aircraft struck a group of militants who were planting explosives in the area of Nur Shams, an urban refugee camp near the city of Tulkarem. The camp has been a frequent target of the Israeli military and is known as a militant stronghold.

Israel has been operating in Nur Shams for the past week. An Israeli soldier was killed by a roadside explosion in the camp on Monday, the military said.

Since the Israel-Hamas war, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank, with Israeli raids into Palestinian cities and towns driving up the death toll.

An anti-settlement watchdog group says Israeli authorities are scheduled to approve or advance construction of over 6,000 new settlement homes in the occupied West Bank in the coming days.

Peace Now said the Higher Planning Committee, the defence body responsible for settlement planning, is set to approve the construction at meetings on Wednesday and Thursday. A spokesman for COGAT, the Israeli defence body that oversees the committee, declined to comment.