Israel orders more evacuations in Gaza but Palestinians have nowhere to go

Israeli warplanes heavily bombarded an area around Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday as the military ordered mass evacuations from the city in the face of a widening ground offensive. 

Palestinians are being pushed into a progressively shrinking portion of the besieged territory, raising sharp questions about what will happen to them.

The expanded assault posed a deadly choice for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — either stay in the path of Israeli forces or flee within the confines of southern Gaza with no guarantee of safety. 

Aid workers warned that the mass movement would worsen the already dire humanitarian catastrophe in the territory.

“Another wave of displacement is underway, and the humanitarian situation worsens by the hour,” Thomas White, the Gaza chief of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Adding to the chaos, phone and internet networks across Gaza collapsed again Monday evening, the Palestinian telecom provider PalTel reported. 

The network has broken down multiple times during the war, making it largely impossible for residents to communicate with each other or the outside world for hours or sometimes several days until it is repaired.

Human Rights Watch has previously warned that such communication blackouts risk providing a cover for atrocities in Gaza. 

Israel has vowed to eliminate Hamas, whose 7 October attack on Israel from Gaza killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggered the deadliest violence in decades. 

The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of the territory’s population of 2.3 million people. Palestinian health officials say bombardment has killed several hundred civilians