Gazans were bracing for expanded hostilities on Saturday, a day after the truce between Israel and Hamas ended, as Israel began turning its focus on southern Gaza for the war’s next phase and as the flow of vital supplies of food, water and medicine again slowed to a trickle.
Israel’s military said it carried out 200 strikes on Gaza on Friday, plunging the territory’s 2.2 million civilians back into the peril and suffering they have been living under since the war began on Oct 7.
By Friday evening, 178 people had been killed and an additional 578 injured, according to Gazan health officials. The wartime death toll had been about 13,000 when the temporary cease-fire took effect a week earlier.
After a four-week ground operation in the northern half of the Gaza Strip, Israel believes the top leadership of Hamas, which controls most of the enclave, is now hiding in southern Gaza. Israeli leaders on Friday reiterated their resolve to ensure that the armed group — which was responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, according to the Israeli authorities — would never again be able to pose a threat to Israel.
The Gazan Interior Ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app early Saturday that Israel had intensified artillery fire and airstrikes on Al Qarara, a town north of Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza.
Some Palestinians near Khan Younis said Friday that Israeli military aircraft had dropped leaflets directing people to evacuate farther south to shelters in the area of Rafah, a city along Gaza’s border with Egypt. The leaflets, which had the insignia of the Israel Defense Forces, declared Khan Younis — where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering after being told to leave their homes in the north — “a dangerous combat zone.”
