CAIRO (Reuters) – Israeli forces on Wednesday issued new evacuation orders to Palestinians in areas of north Gaza that were among the first to be hit at the start of the war with Hamas in October, after militants fired a fresh volley of rockets into Israel.
Army spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted the evacuation orders for several districts in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya, two now largely demolished towns into which Israeli tanks swept at the outset of Israel’s ground invasion.
“Hamas and terrorist organizations are firing rockets from your area towards the State of Israel. The IDF will act forcefully and immediately against them,” Adraee said in the message sent by text or social media to Palestinian residents.
“For your own safety, evacuate immediately to the known shelters in the center of Gaza City,” the army spokesman said.
In a nearby Gaza City neighborhood, Al-Tuffah, an Israeli airstrike on a house killed three Palestinians, medics said.
MULTIPLE FRONTS
Fighting has continued in the Gaza Strip even as Israel braces for an expected assault in its north from Iran and its close Lebanese ally Hezbollah after the July 31 assassination in the Iranian capital Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The Israeli military says it has killed dozens of Gaza militants in recent days and on Wednesday said troops had hit weapons-making facilities in the teeming district of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the fighting have taken shelter.
In other central areas, Israeli tanks shelled Nuseirat and Bureij, two of Gaza Strip’s eight historic refugee camps. Israel says Hamas militants use civilian infrastructure for cover and to conceal operations posts and arms caches; Hamas denies this.
Militants say they continue to carry out ambush attacks on Israeli troops and armored vehicles with explosive devices, and are still able to launch limited rocket salvoes into Israel.
On Tuesday, Islamic Jihad, a close Hamas ally, said it fired rockets into Israel in response to what it called Israeli “massacres of civilians”.
The Israeli military said that over the past week Hamas had fired rockets from launchers embedded near two international humanitarian aid and distribution warehouses, including the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. Israeli forces had struck those sites, it added.
Hamas-led militants set off the Gaza war on Oct. 7 with a cross-border rampage into Israeli communities, killing 1,200 Israelis and foreigners and seizing some 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
In response, Israel has pursued a relentless assault on Gaza that has reduced much of the heavily populated coastal strip to ruins, killed at least 39,600 Palestinians and wounded over 91,500, according to Gaza health ministry figures.
The Hamas-led ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its death lists.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo; additional reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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