The Israeli military on Saturday called on Palestinians in the Maghazi area of central Gaza to evacuate and head to the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone.
Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, published a list of the zones that needed to be evacuated alongside the announcement.
He said that the military would “forcefully operate” against terror groups in the area, following recent rocket attacks.
The IDF previously operated with ground forces in Maghazi earlier this year.
The military also said Saturday morning that dozens of gunmen were killed in operations in the Strip over the past day, as the military has expanded its operation in Khan Younis.
The IDF said Israeli Air Force fighter jets and drones struck more than 40 targets across Gaza, including buildings used by terror groups, weapon depots, and a launcher used to fire rockets at the Re’im area Friday night.
In southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, where the 98th Division launched a new operation last week, the IDF said that the offensive had been “expanded” in the past day. Troops killed several gunmen and destroyed dozens of Hamas sites they had located.
The division also directed an IAF drone strike on a cell of terrorists that fired a barrage of five rockets at the border community of Nirim on Friday, according to the military. The cell was killed in the strike.
Further south, in Rafah, the IDF said forces continued to operate in the northwestern Tel Sultan neighborhood, where troops killed several gunmen and destroyed sites belonging to terror groups in the past day.
In the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza, reservists killed several more terror operatives. In one case, the military directed a drone strike on a terrorist who had launched rockets at troops.
The Israeli Navy, with shelling from its vessels, also killed several gunmen in central Gaza, who the IDF said “posed a threat to the forces in the area.”
Meanwhile, 10 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the town of Zawayda in central Gaza, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. The IDF has not yet commented on the strike.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said an Israeli airstrike killed 15 people from a Palestinian family, including nine children and three women.
The strike hit the home of the Ajlah family in the Al-Zawaida neighborhood of central Gaza, civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
The Israeli military was aware of reports of 15 people killed in a Gaza airstrike and was looking into them, a spokesperson said.
A senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed optimistic talk by US President Joe Biden that a Gaza truce was nearer after negotiations in the Gulf emirate of Qatar.
“To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP. “We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”
He was responding to Biden’s comment on Friday, when the US president said “We are closer than we have ever been.”
Biden spoke after two days of talks in Qatar where Washington tried to bridge differences between Israel and Hamas. The two sides have been at war for more than 10 months in the Gaza Strip.
Previous optimism during months of on-off ceasefire-and-hostage release talks has so far proven futile.
However, the stakes have significantly risen since the killings in quick succession in late July of Fuad Shukr, a top operations chief of Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group, and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh.
Their deaths led to vows of vengeance from Hezbollah, Iran and other Tehran-backed groups in the region which blamed Israel.
In an effort to avert a broader conflict, Western and Arab diplomats have been shuttling around the Middle East to push for a Gaza deal which they say could help avert a wider regional conflagration.
Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was to head on Saturday to Israel in a bid to finalize an agreement.
The IDF said Thursday that more than 50 tunnels had been discovered along the Philadelphi Corridor, on the Egypt-Gaza border area, and demolished by combat engineers over the past week.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that the military has killed more than 17,000 terror operatives in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war.
He said in a press conference that the IDF’s “significant fighting” and achievements had harmed Hamas’s ability to regroup and recover. “We are determined to continue this,” he said.
Hamas kidnapped 251 people during its thousands-strong rampage through southern Israel on October 7, which left nearly 1,200 people dead. It is believed that 111 of the hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF. The terror group is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says the Palestinian death toll since the terror group launched its October 7 attack on Israel has passed 40,000. The figure cannot be independently verified and includes the more than 17,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says it has killed in battle as of August. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.