Israel’s latest evacuation order for eastern Khan Younis has “wiped out” the UN’s efforts to improve aid deliveries via the Kerem Shalom border crossing in southern Gaza, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Wednesday.
“We have been engineering a lot of solutions and trying and testing, improving and failing – at times – and now with this evacuation order, all this has been, again, wiped out,” Andrea De Domenico, head of the OCHA for the Palestinian territories, told reporters, according to Reuters.
Israel’s evacuation order impacted 250,000 Palestinians living in Khan Younis, and many had recently fled Israel’s assault on Rafah. One Palestinian family that fled Khan Younis to an Israeli-declared “safe zone” in Deir al-Balah was hit by an Israeli strike on Tuesday that killed 12 people, including five children and three women.
On Wednesday, Israel strikes continued to hit targets across the Gaza Strip. According to Al Jazeera, Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 28 Palestinians were killed in the previous 24-hour period.
One of the strikes on Wednesday slammed into a residential building next to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which is in the western part of the city that Israel claimed is a safe zone. A day earlier, patients and medical staff from the European Hospital in eastern Khan Younis fled to the Nasser Hospital.
De Domenico noted the bombings of the so-called “safe zones” and said Gaza was “the only place in the world where people cannot find a safe refuge, and can’t leave the front line.”