The Hamas health ministry announced that seventy Palestinians were killed in Israeli military operations in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, from where thousands of panicked civilians fled again, following the emergency evacuation order issued yesterday morning.

As the war between Israel and Hamas, now in its 291st day, rages on, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington, where he is expected to meet with US President Joe Biden today before addressing the full US Senate tomorrow. Congress.

Departing Israel, he described the visit as “very important” at a time of “great political uncertainty” following President Biden’s decision to drop out of his re-election campaign in November.

Israel’s main international ally and supplier of military hardware, the Biden administration, has barely concealed its irritation in recent months at the consequences of large-scale operations launched in retaliation for Hamas’s military arm’s incursion into southern sectors of Israel. territory on October 7, the trigger for this war, publicly insisting on the need to protect civilians and get humanitarian aid into the besieged and devastated enclave.

The Israeli operations of the past nine-plus months against Hamas and other Palestinian armed movements are repeated in particular in areas that the Israeli military assured it had brought under its control.

At least 70 Palestinians have been killed and more than 200 wounded in “occupation” — Israeli attacks — in Khan Younis “since the morning,” the health ministry of the Hamas-led government in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007 said.

When AFP tried to reach him for comment, the Israeli military did not respond. In a statement earlier, he assured that the air force and tanks “bombed and eliminated terrorists” in this area.

In front of the Khan Younis Nasser Hospital, where the dead and wounded were treated, heartbreaking scenes were unfolding, under the eyes of the nursing staff, who could not cope: a man held the lifeless body of a screaming toddler; a woman collapsed from the emotional load; bloodied youths watched on.

The Israeli army withdrew in early April from Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern part of the Palestinian enclave, stressing that it had achieved its goals, after months of shelling and fighting in the cluster with members of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist movement that Israel, the US and the EU label it a terrorist organization.

But yesterday morning he ordered the civilian population to urgently leave eastern Khan Yunis, announcing that he was preparing for an “operation against terrorist organizations” after rockets were fired from there into Israeli territory.

“We were preparing breakfast” when suddenly “shells fell, then warning leaflets”, said Hasan Qudai, who was forced to take his family and flee, like thousands of other civilians.

“There are witnesses (lying) in the streets. Gaza is over. Gaza is dead. There’s nothing left. Enough,” he added.

Youssef Abu Taima, displaced for the fourth time, was at a loss for words. “We will live on the street” again, “we are exhausted, we cannot bear any more displacements,” he said.

On October 7, members of Hamas’ military arm in the Gaza Strip launched an unprecedented raid in southern Israel, during which 1,197 people, mostly civilians, were killed, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Another 251 people were kidnapped, of whom 116 are still being held in the small coastal enclave, but 44 of them are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

The ensuing large-scale air, naval and ground operations in Gaza have killed at least 39,000 people, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas government’s health ministry.

Yesterday, the Forum of Families of Hostages and the Disappeared announced the deaths of two more men abducted on October 7, Yagev Buchsetav, 35, and Alex Dansig, 76. The deaths “remind how urgent” it is to strike a deal to free the hostages, the Forum said, without going into details of how they were killed.

In cooperation with Qatar and Egypt, Washington continues efforts to resume indirect negotiations to declare a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, accompanied by the release of Israeli hostages in the enclave and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. An Israeli delegation is expected in Doha the day after Thursday, according to an AFP source briefed on the matter.

In a show of support for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, facing a humanitarian disaster and threatened by famine according to the UN, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, allies of Hamas and Iran, sworn enemies of Israel, have opened separate fronts.

On Saturday, the day after a deadly Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv, Israel’s air force bombed the rebel-held port of Hodeidah in western Yemen, killing at least six people and destroying infrastructure, particularly facilities fuel storage.