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BEIRUT — Israel on Sunday was broadening its military offensive in beleaguered Gaza, stepping up strikes in the enclave’s central region, and narrowing further the small amount of territory where it says Palestinians should seek safety from the fighting.
The Israel Defense Forces struck at least three areas in central Gaza on Saturday and Sunday, including the Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps, as well as the city of Deir al-Balah, where on Friday it had urged residents to flee.
Late on Sunday, the Gaza Health Ministry said 70 people were killed in an Israeli strike on a residential block in Maghazi. The Al Jazeera news network aired footage from what it said was the chaotic aftermath of the strike. In the dark, people scrambled to dig for survivors and directed the wounded, dazed and bloody, away from the site.
A flood of patients arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. “You can’t even walk in the corridors” of the hospital, Khalil al-Degran, a local doctor, told Al Jazeera. In the background, more than a dozen bodies covered in white shrouds were lined up on the ground.
“We do not know where we will go,” said Rami Abu Azara, 48, who sought refuge in Bureij, north of Maghazi, with his family after fleeing northern Gaza early in the war. “All the shelter centers in the central regions are crowded, and our fate will be on the street.”
The Israeli military called Abu Azara and his family over the weekend, he said, instructing them to leave Bureij and move toward Deir al-Balah. “We took refuge here thinking that these places were safe,” he said. “But the truth is that death stalks us from everywhere.”
The IDF first urged residents on Friday to leave eight areas in central Gaza and evacuate south to shelters in Deir al-Balah, which the United Nations said “is already overcrowded, hosting several hundred thousand IDPs,” or displaced people, mostly from the north.
But the map accompanying the announcement was unclear, residents said, and appeared to include areas, such as neighborhoods in nearby Nuseirat, that weren’t explicitly named in the statement. Adding to the confusion were the frequent communication outages across Gaza, leaving many Palestinians there without internet or cellphone connections to coordinate their evacuations.
People in Gaza “are not pieces on a checkerboard,” Thomas White, a senior U.N. official in Gaza, wrote Saturday on X, formerly Twitter. “The Israeli Army just orders people to move into areas where there are ongoing airstrikes. No place is safe, nowhere to go.”
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said earlier Sunday that its teams evacuated “a large number” of dead and wounded following a strike overnight on a house in Deir al-Balah. Also Sunday, the Gaza Health Ministry said 166 people had been killed over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of recorded deaths in Gaza to 20,424 since the start of the war on Oct. 7, when Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in a surprise attack inside Israel.
The death toll released earlier Sunday did not include the 70 people later reported killed in the strike in Maghazi.
In a sign of the worsening fighting, 15 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza over the weekend, the IDF said. The majority were killed in battles in southern Gaza, the military said, while four soldiers were killed in central Gaza on Saturday.
The IDF also continued to face fierce resistance in northern Gaza, where fighting raged north of Gaza City and in the Jabalya refugee camp. The military said that a tank commander was killed in northern Gaza on Sunday.
“This is a difficult morning, after a very difficult day of fighting in Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting, Reuters reported.
“The war is exacting a very heavy cost from us; however, we have no choice (but) to continue to fight,” he said.
Despite the increased strikes on central Gaza, Michael Milshtein, the former head of Palestinian affairs at Israel’s military intelligence agency, said Sunday that he did not believe the IDF would immediately send ground troops into towns and cities in the region.
Instead, he said, the military’s current focus there is on destroying Hamas’s tunnel network, as well as the group’s ability to use the area to fire rockets.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Sunday that the IDF was “deepening the fighting,” including in Khan Younis, where troops were also focused on uncovering and destroying “underground infrastructure.”
He conceded that there were “quite a few” IDF casualties over the weekend, and downplayed earlier statements in which he said the military had “operational control” in parts of northern Gaza.
The war’s escalation followed the passage on Friday of a painfully negotiated U.N. Security Council resolution on Gaza, which called for “urgent and extended” pauses in the fighting. The measure, on which the United States abstained, also demanded the rapid expansion and facilitation of humanitarian aid to Gaza, where experts say the civilian population is now close to famine.
In a bleak report on Thursday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global stakeholder initiative that helps measure and predict acute malnutrition, said that hostilities in Gaza have caused “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity” and that the risk of famine was “increasing each day.”
It warned that Deir al-Balah and central Gaza were particularly vulnerable as the fighting expands. Wedged between Israeli troops in northern and southern Gaza, the war is “preventing significant portions of the population from accessing humanitarian assistance and basic services,” including food, water, sanitation and health care.
“We know that danger is approaching us and we know that the army has instructed all residents of Bureij camp to move, but where?” said Anwar Islah, 31. He is sheltering with his family and thousands of others at a U.N.-run school in Bureij, but says they refuse to move.
“It is true that we don’t currently live in ideal conditions and we suffer from many diseases because of severe overcrowding,” he said. “But displacement means that we will have chosen death many times.”
Also in Bureij, at a separate school, Abu Azara says he is holding out hope that Israeli troops and tanks won’t advance to where he and his family are staying. The displaced people in Bureij, he said, are worried they will face the same fate as evacuees from the north, who were forced to transit through Israeli checkpoints on a main road.
They are afraid “they will be arrested, stripped of their clothes,” he said. But staying could also mean “certain death,” Abu Azara added.
Berger reported from Jerusalem and Harb from London.