More than 180,000 people have been displaced in four days of fighting around the town of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip after the Israeli army’s operation to remove bodies of prisoners from there, the UN said today.

Nearly 182,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee central and eastern Khan Younis since Monday as “escalating hostilities” spark “new waves of internal displacement across Gaza,” the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement , adding that “hundreds of other people remain trapped on the eastern side of Khan Younis.”

For its part, the Israeli military announced that it had “killed about 100 terrorists” in Khan Younis after announcing the operation four days ago.

On Thursday, the army announced that it had collected from Khan Younis the bodies of five Israelis, including two soldiers and two reservists, who were killed during the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and taken to the Gaza Strip.

Israeli army chief General Herji Halevi said soldiers removed the bodies of the prisoners from underground tunnels and walls inside “a hidden place”.

“We were close to these bodies before, but we didn’t know how to get to them” until this week, he added in a press release issued by the military today.

According to witnesses and rescuers, heavy fighting continued today on the eastern side of Khan Yunis. A medical source said 26 bodies were brought to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis today.

The war in the Gaza Strip erupted on October 7 after Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israeli soil killed 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Of the 251 people abducted during the attack, 111 are still being held in Gaza, of whom 39 are dead, according to the military.

In response, Israel launched an attack that has already killed at least 39,175 people, according to figures from the government’s health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza, which does not give any figures on the number of civilians and fighters killed.