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Israeli forces struck southern Gaza overnight, targeting areas of Khan Younis from which rockets had been launched at Israel a day earlier, the military said on Tuesday.
The strikes came after the Israeli military ordered new evacuations of eastern Khan Younis and the southern Gaza city of Rafah. Such orders are usually an indication that the military plans a ground assault, but the military did not say on Tuesday whether it would send troops into Khan Younis, an area its forces invaded earlier in the war but had vacated.
An evacuation announcement posted late Monday on social media by the Israeli military’s spokesman for Arab media, Avichay Adraee, said that people in the designated areas “must evacuate immediately” for their safety. That area includes the European Gaza Hospital, leading scores of patients and medical staff there to flee.
Doctors at the hospital, near Khan Younis, said overnight on Monday that they had also received orders to evacuate. The Israeli military said in a statement on Tuesday morning that it had “no intention to evacuate the European Hospital.”
Source: Israeli military announcements
By Leanne Abraham
Large swaths of Khan Younis were leveled during an extended assault at the beginning of the year, after which Israeli forces withdrew, claiming to have destroyed the Hamas battalions there. But Israeli commanders have repeatedly sent troops back into areas they had supposedly secured to put down resurgent pockets of Hamas fighters.
The evacuation order was announced after the Israeli military reported that at least 20 rockets were fired from southern Gaza toward Israel and said it had fired artillery in response, striking the sources of the launches.
Most of Gaza’s population of some 2.2 million has been displaced over the course of the war; many people have been forced to flee repeatedly under evacuation orders or to escape fighting.
The United Nations condemned Monday’s evacuation order. “It shows yet again that no place is safe in Gaza,” Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, told reporters in New York, adding that the announcement underscored the need for a cease-fire. “It is another stop in this deadly circular movement that the population of Gaza has to undergo on a regular basis,” he added.
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Dr. Mohammed Harara, an emergency doctor at the European Gaza Hospital, shared videos with The New York Times on Monday that showed wounded patients at the hospital being transferred to stretchers and others being wheeled out, with rooms in disarray from the hurried evacuations. He estimated that there had been about 600 patients at the hospital and said he was still there, working on the evacuations.
In a message sent in the early hours of Tuesday, Dr. Harara said he could hear bombing very close by and that injured patients were arriving at the hospital, despite the evacuation order.
A doctor at Nasser Hospital, about six miles away, reported “mass chaos” and fistfights at its emergency room as ambulances arrived with patients from European Gaza Hospital, who had to vie for care with incoming patients from the area.
The doctor, Hina Cheema, a Pakistani American on a humanitarian mission at Nasser, said that the evacuations were complicated because roads in the area had been mostly destroyed and were now crowded with people fleeing, and that unstable patients risked death during transport. The drive from European Gaza Hospital to Nasser takes about 30 minutes in the current conditions, both she and Dr. Harara said.
There were about 300 to 400 beds at European Gaza Hospital, said Shéhérazade Kaoues, a spokeswoman for FAJR Scientific, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that has been organizing humanitarian medical missions to Gaza. But many more patients and displaced people were sheltering there before the evacuation order came, she said.
Ms. Kaoues said her organization had three foreign medical volunteers at European Gaza, but that all had been evacuated to a safe house.
In May, a group of about 16 international health care workers were stranded at European Gaza Hospital for roughly two weeks after Israel seized the Rafah border crossing near Egypt. At the time, there were no evacuation orders for the hospital, said Adam Hamawy, an American doctor at the hospital at the time. He wrote to President Biden about the dire peril in Gaza, saying that no one was safe, including civilians and humanitarian workers.
One of the medical workers who had been stranded at European Gaza in May, Dr. Mohammed Tahir, is an orthopedic and peripheral nerve surgeon from Britain who is now on his second medical mission with Fajr Scientific at the European Gaza Hospital. On Monday, he said he had evacuated to a safe house. In a video message posted on social media and shared with The Times, he said, “My feelings are that of disbelief, heartbreak, sadness. I literally left my patients back in the E.G.H. I don’t know who is going to look after them.”
He described working on patients with complicated injuries before his evacuation, including bone infections, and said he was uncertain of their fates. “These people will become sick very quickly and possibly even die within a matter of days,” he said.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Monday that his country’s forces were “advancing toward the final stage of eliminating” Hamas’s “terrorist army,” though he added that Israel would still have to continue to “strike its remnants.” Mr. Netanyahu’s comments, made to cadets at Israel’s National Defense College, were the latest sign that his government intends to wind down major military operations against Hamas in Gaza in the near future and shift the military’s focus to the cross-border conflict with Hezbollah in Israel’s north.
The Israeli military said seven “projectiles” launched from Lebanon on Monday fell in three Israeli farming communities along the northern border, but there were no injuries reported. The military said that the Israeli Air Force had struck five targets in southern Lebanon on Monday that it characterized as “terrorist infrastructure” sites or military compounds.
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The release on Monday of the director of Gaza’s largest hospital, who was held in Israeli detention for more than seven months without charges, was welcomed by Palestinian and rights groups but set off an uproar across the Israeli political spectrum and exposed growing tensions among officials in the government.
Mohammad Abu Salmiya directed Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, an early focus of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. He was taken into custody in late November while traveling with a U.N. convoy of ambulances evacuating patients from the hospital to southern Gaza, and was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint, according to the Gaza health ministry and the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
The Israeli military later publicized some evidence to support its case that Hamas operated from within the Shifa complex, including by showing reporters a fortified tunnel constructed underneath its grounds. An investigation by The New York Times suggested that Hamas had used the site for cover and stored weapons there.
Dr. Abu Salmiya’s release appeared to stun Israeli officials. Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right minister charged with national security, called the doctor’s release “security negligence,” and blamed Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and the chief of the intelligence agency Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, for policies that he said contradicted the government’s decisions.
Mr. Gallant’s office deflected responsibility, issuing a statement saying the release of detainees is “not subject to approval of the Minister of Defense.” The Israeli Prison Service said in a statement that the decision had been made by the Israeli military and the Shin Bet, but the military said Dr. Abu Salmiya had not been in its custody.
Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from the decision. In a statement on Monday, he called the release of the hospital director “an egregious error and a moral failure,” saying that he and other key authorities were not informed and that whoever is responsible should themselves be incarcerated.
Seeking to quell the growing outrage, Mr. Netanyahu said he was looking into the decision and expected answers from Mr. Bar of the Shin Bet late on Monday. He also said he would set up a team of security and military officials to vet detainees before release.
Benny Gantz, a centrist minister who resigned from the war cabinet led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in June, suggested to Mr. Netanyahu in a statement on Monday, “Prime Minister, if you close some government offices. I am sure that space and funds will be freed up for jails.”
Mr. Gantz took the opportunity to call for elections, yet again.
On Monday, at a news conference in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, a visibly frail Dr. Abu Salmiya said that nearly 50 other Palestinian detainees, including other doctors and health ministry staff members, had also been released and returned to Gaza.
“We were subjected to extreme torture,” Dr. Abu Salmiya said. He said he had been beaten over the head repeatedly and that his finger had been broken.
Human rights groups have said that Dr. Abu Salmiya’s prolonged detention without charges is an example of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners, and his release comes as the Israeli Supreme Court is weighing a petition demanding the closure of an army barracks turned jail, Sde Teiman, where thousands of Gazans have been detained since the war started last year.
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It was not immediately clear if Dr. Abu Salmiya had previously been held at Sde Teiman. He was released from another prison, Nafha, according to the Israeli Prison Service.
However, a statement from Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, referred to the controversy surrounding Sde Teiman in a statement on Monday explaining the doctor’s release. The statement noted that a decision had been made to hold detainees at Sde Teiman for only short periods of time, and said that made it necessary “to release dozens of detainees in order to clear places of incarceration.” The statement said that the Shin Bet had warned elected officials “in every possible forum” that it needed more space “in view of the need to arrest terrorists.”
The health ministry in Gaza called for the release of all other detained medical workers from Gaza who were “arrested and abused simply because they were treating the sick and wounded.”
At least 310 medical workers in Gaza have been detained by Israeli forces since the start of the war, but did not specify how many had been released, the ministry said.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
