Israel requests evacuation of largest UNRWA shelter in Khan Younis

GAZA CITY, Palestine

The Israeli army requested Thursday that displaced people located in the largest shelter belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the city of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip evacuate the premises by the following afternoon.

The army warned those staying in the UNRWA Khan Younis Training Centre to evacuate on foot before 5 p.m. local time on Friday.

The warning comes a day after Israeli artillery targeted a building in the center, resulting in the deaths of 12 displaced people and the injury of 75 others, according to a statement by UNRWA.

An Anadolu correspondent reported that the army made phone calls to the displaced inside the center, urging them to evacuate.

Some of the displaced people who managed to leave the center and arrive safely in Rafah raised their identification cards, saying the army asked them to do so for identification purposes.

In separate statements to Anadolu's correspondent, they said the army had set up barriers in passages they claimed were safe for conducting security checks on displaced people.

Witnesses informed Anadolu that more than 50 vehicles and tanks gathered around Al-Aqsa University and the UNRWA training center west of Khan Yunis.

Earlier on Thursday, the Israeli army dropped leaflets on several neighborhoods in Khan Younis, urging residents to evacuate.

In the leaflets, the army said: “Residents of Khan Younis area in Al-Nasr, Al-Amal and the city center and camp, in blocks 107-112: For your safety, you must move immediately to the humanitarian area in Al-Mawassi via Sea Street.”

UNRWA noted on Wednesday that “Khan Younis vocational training center is one of the largest UNRWA facilities sheltering nearly 30,000 displaced people. The compound is clearly marked as UN facility and its coordinates were shared with Israeli authorities as we do for all our facilities.”

The agency added that “once again, (there has been) a blatant disregard of basic rules of war.”

Israel has launched a deadly offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, killing at least 25,900 Palestinians and injuring 64,110 others. Nearly 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack.

The Israeli war has left 85% of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while more than half of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

*Writing by Rania Abu Shamala