Israel has issued yet another round of evacuation orders, this time for neighbourhoods in central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp.
It is the third time Israel has ordered new Gaza neighbourhoods to evacuate in as many days, displacing tens of thousands of people.
The evacuation orders extended to Salah al-Din Street, which is the main road linking northern and southern Gaza and even linking different central governorates.
According to UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Israel’s latest evacuation orders have pushed thousands more families out of their homes and shrunk Gaza’s declared “humanitarian zone” even further.
Now, the “humanitarian zone” encompasses just 11 percent of the war-torn enclave, said the UN agency, with displaced people left in “chaos and fear.”
Meanwhile, war monitors reported that Israel’s mass evacuation orders for areas of the Gaza Strip are “no longer a reliable indicator” that an Israeli ground operation is imminent.
Addressing the most recent orders for people to flee Beit Hanoon city in the north of Gaza, US-based think tanks; the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Critical Threats Project (CTP) said that Israeli forces had already issued evacuation orders for the area on August 7, 2024.
The latest ISW-CTP joint report also stated that Israeli ground forces did not advance on Beit Hanoon despite the earlier order for people to leave, and they have “not conducted clearing operations in all of the recent evacuation zones.”
At Least 10 Killed In Israeli Attack On Southern Lebanon
Also on Saturday, Lebanon’s Ministry of Health announced that an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon has killed at least 10 people.
The ministry said in a statement that the death toll from the strike in the Nabatieh area included “a woman and her two children” and left five other people wounded, two critically, adding that a residential building was hit.
Israel’s military claimed on its Telegram channel that the air force had struck a weapons warehouse of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah overnight “in the area of Nabatieh”, located about 12km (seven miles) from the nearest point to the Israeli border.
Earlier, the military posted on social media that its fighter jets attacked “military buildings” in the villages of Maroun al-Ras and Aita al-Shaab, more than 50km (31 miles) south of Nabatieh city.
The strike is among the deadliest in Lebanon since Hezbollah started trading near-daily fire with Israeli forces in support of its ally Hamas and in solidarity with the Palestinian people since the October 7 attack on southern Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, Israel, Hezbollah and other armed groups in Lebanon exchanged at least 8,533 attacks across the border from October 7 to July 31.
Meanwhile, Northern Israel was on high alert after the Nabatieh attack.
Israel’s Upper Galilee Regional Council issued an alert for residents near the Lebanese border, urging them to stay near bomb shelters.
It said that the warning applied to residents of the Israeli communities of Hulata, Yesud HaMa’ala, Sde Eliezer, Ayelet Hashachar, Gadot, Mishmar HaYarden and Machanayim.
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