The Israel Defense Forces announced Friday that an officer in the Nahal Brigade’s reconnaissance unit was hospitalized after being seriously wounded during fighting a day earlier in the southern Gaza Strip, where the military told residents in the Khan Younis area to evacuate to an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone ahead of renewed operations there.
In early July, the IDF ordered Palestinians in eastern Khan Younis to evacuate, before carrying out an operation there. The military has since withdrawn.
Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, published a list of the zones that needed to be evacuated alongside the latest announcement, which include the Khan Younis suburbs of al-Qarara and Bani Suheila, the Abasan neighborhoods, the town of Khuza’a.
Adraee warned the military would “forcefully operate” against terror groups in the area, and Palestinian media later reported that the IDF had begun new ground operations.
Some 1.9 million Palestinians of the 2.3 million Gazan population are currently in the humanitarian zone, located in the al-Mawasi area on the Strip’s coast, western neighborhoods of Khan Younis, and central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.
Elsewhere in southern Gaza, the IDF said Thursday that it uncovered and destroyed several rocket launchers near the Egyptian border, adjacent to the Strip’s largest fuel depot.
The IDF said that there was no harm to the fuel depot in the operation to demolish the luanchers, which troops of the 605th Combat Engineering Battalion carried out the previous night.
“Any damage to the facility, including rocket fire from these nearby launch pits, could endanger the lives of tens of thousands of Gazan citizens in the surrounding areas. This is a further example of the systematic abuse of civilian and humanitarian infrastructure by the terror organizations in Gaza,” the IDF said.
In Gaza City, the IDF said Thursday that it carried out airstrikes against Hamas command and control centers embedded within two schools.
According to the IDF, Hamas operatives were gathered at the Abdel Fattah Hamoud and al-Zahraa schools, in Gaza City’s Daraj and Tuffah neighborhoods, when the strikes were carried out.
Palestinian media said that at least five were killed at the Abdel Fattah Hamoud School and another seven were killed at the al-Zahraa School.
The school compounds were used as command and control centers for terrorists and commanders in the Hamas terror organization,” from which they planned and carried out attacks against troops in Gaza and against Israel, the military said.
To mitigate harm to civilians, the IDF said it carried out “many steps,” including using aerial surveillance, a “precision munition,” and other intelligence.
Israel has increasingly been carrying out pinpoint operations in Gaza in the ongoing war against Hamas, sparked by the terror group’s brutal October 7 onslaught in southern Israel that saw 1,200 people murdered and 251 taken hostage.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 39,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 331.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.