GAZA: Israeli troops fought their way back into an eastern section of Khan Yunis in a surprise raid, residents said on Monday, sending people who had returned to abandoned homes in the ruins of the southern Gaza Strip’s main city fleeing once more.

Elsewhere in Khan Yunis, scores more bodies were recovered from what Palestinian authorities said were mass graves on the site of the city’s main hospital, abandoned by Israeli troops. Further south there were fresh air strikes on Rafah, the last refuge where more than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million people have sought shelter.

Israel abruptly pulled most of its ground troops out of the southern Gaza Strip this month after some of the most intense fighting of the seven-month-old war. Residents have begun making their way home to previously unaccessible neighbourhoods of what had been the enclave’s second-biggest city, finding homes reduced to rubble and unrecovered dead in the streets.

“This morning many families who had left here in the past two weeks to go back home to Abassan came back. They were too frightened,” Ahmed Rezik, 42, said from a school where he is sheltering in the western part of Khan Younis, referring to a district in the east.

“They said tanks pushed in the eastern area of the town under heavy fire, and they had to run for lives,” he said via a chat app.

Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run government media office, accused Israel of carrying out “executions” at the hospital and covering up the crimes by burying bodies with a bulldozer.

Relatives have been coming to take away loved ones for reburial. Family members brought the body of Osama al-Shoubagy, one of those recovered inside the hospital grounds, to a graveyard on Monday to rebury him next to his sister, to whom he had once donated a kidney when she was sick.

“My young daughter asked me to visit the grave of her father. I would tell her that as soon as we bury him, we will visit him. Thank God. The scene is tough, but we might find some relief after burying him,” said his wife Soumaya.

In one hand she held a few yellow flowers, in the other, the hand of their small daughter Hind, who wore a pale yellow Disney “Frozen” tracksuit to say goodbye to her father.

“He loved me, (and used to) buy things for me, and he used to take me out,” the small girl said by the side of the new grave.

Air strikes

Gaza residents reported air strikes in several other areas, including Rafah, where a day earlier doctors had performed a caesarean section to save a baby from the womb of his mother who was among those killed.

In Nusseirat in central Gaza, officials said an air strike had damaged solar panels the hospital relies on for power.

Published in Dawn, April 23nd, 2024