GAZA/JERUSALEM - Israel issued a fresh warning to Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate west out of the line of fire and closer to humanitarian aid in the latest indication that it plans to attack Hamas in southern Gaza after subduing the north.

“We’re asking people to relocate. I know it’s not easy for many of them, but we don’t want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire,” Mr Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC on Nov 17.

Such a move could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to relocate again, along with residents of the southern city of Khan Younis, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.

Khan Younis has a population of more than 400,000.

Israel vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip following an Oct 7 rampage into Israel in which its fighters killed 1,200 people and dragged 240 hostages into the enclave.

Since then, Israel has bombed much of Gaza City to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the entire northern half of the enclave and left homeless around two-thirds of the strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians.

Many of those who have fled fear their displacement could become permanent.

Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Friday to more than 12,000 people, 5,000 of them children. The United Nations deems those figures credible, though they are now updated infrequently due to the difficulty of collecting information.

Israel overnight Nov 16 dropped leaflets over eastern areas of Khan Younis telling people to evacuate to shelters, suggesting that military operations there are imminent.

Mr Regev said that Israeli Defence Forces will have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters from underground tunnels and bunkers, but that no such “enormous infrastructure” exists in less built-up areas to the west.

“I’m pretty sure that they won’t have to move again” if they move west, he continued. “We’re asking them to move to an area where hopefully there will be tents and a field hospital.”

Because the western areas are closer to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, humanitarian aid could be brought in “as quickly as possible,” he said.

Fuel deliveries

With the war entering its seventh week, there was no sign of any let-up despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least for humanitarian pauses.

“We have prepared ourselves for a long and sustained defence from all directions. The more time the occupation’s forces stay in Gaza, the heavier their continuous losses,” Mr Abu Ubaida, Hamas armed wing spokesman, said in a video statement.

Amid warnings that its siege would cause starvation and disease, Israel on Nov 17 appeared to bow to international pressure, agreeing to allow fuel trucks into Gaza and promising “no limitation” on aid requested by the United Nations.

Israel said it had agreed to let in two truckloads of fuel a day at the request of Washington to help the United Nations meet basic needs, and spoke of plans to increase aid more broadly, including setting up field hospitals to treat wounded Gazans.

“We will increase the capacity of the humanitarian convoys and trucks as long as there is a need,” Colonel Elad Goren, from COGAT, the ministry of defence agency that coordinates administrative issues with the Palestinians, told a briefing.

“Every list that we get from the UN will be delivered. We will check it and it will enter Gaza, so it’s up to the UN to give us those lists. And if there is a need for 400 trucks, tomorrow there will be 400 trucks. We are not limiting this issue. There is no limitation.”

While Israel has promised to allow in aid in the past, the remarks appeared to signal a shift in tone after UN agencies warned that humanitarian conditions for 2.3 million Gazans were rapidly deteriorating, including a stark warning from the World Food Programme of the “immediate possibility of starvation”.

The move could open division in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline Cabinet. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the decision to allow in fuel a serious mistake. “It conveys weakness, it gives oxygen into the enemy,” he said in a statement.

At Gaza’s biggest hospital Al Shifa, focus of international alarm this week as a primary target of Israel’s ground assault, Israel said its forces had found a vehicle with a large number of weapons, and an underground structure it called a Hamas tunnel shaft, after two days searching the premises.

The army released a video it said showed a tunnel entrance in an outdoor area of the hospital, littered with concrete and wood rubble and sand. It appeared the area had been excavated. A bulldozer appeared in the background.

The army also said it had found the bodies of two hostages in buildings near, though not inside, the hospital grounds.

Israel has long maintained that the hospital sat above a vast underground bunker housing a Hamas command headquarters. Hospital staff say this is false and that Israel’s findings there have so far established no such thing.

Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes. It says some hostages have received treatment at medical centres but they have not been held inside them.

‘Living nightmare’

Al Shifa staff said a premature baby died at the hospital on Friday, the first baby to die there in the two days since Israeli forces entered. Three had died in the previous days while the hospital was surrounded.

Israel had said it would send help including incubators to rescue 36 babies being kept eight-to-a-bed since the neo-natal ward was knocked out last week. But staff said the Israelis allowed in no meaningful aid for the babies or hundreds of other patients and thousands of displaced people trapped there.

Five babies were in a very serious condition, Al Shifa hospital compound director Muhammad Abu Salmiya told Al Jazeera.

“We are trying to keep them alive, wrapping them in cellophane, putting bottles of hot water near them to keep them alive, our attempts are what is keeping them alive.”

The last hospital fully functioning in the northern half of Gaza, Al Ahli, was forced to close its surgery department after it ran out of anaesthetics. British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, who escaped on foot to the south, told Reuters he had decided to leave because he was now powerless to help patients.

“It has been a living nightmare - leaving 500 wounded knowing that there’s nothing left for you to be able to do for them, it’s just the most heartbreaking thing I ever had to do,” Dr Abu Sitta said by phone.

‘We won’t forget, or forgive’

In Modiin, Israel, family held a funeral for Noa Marciano, 19, an Israeli army conscript whose body was recovered from Gaza City near Shifa hospital on Thursday. She had been abducted from a military base during the Hamas attack on Oct 7.

“Today we’re asking for your forgiveness ... You protected us, but we failed to protect you,” her sobbing mother said, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of her smiling daughter in her high school graduation robes. “You are resting now, but we will not stop. We won’t forget or forgive.”

The military said it had also recovered the body of Yehudit Weiss, 65, a mother of five who was seized from Kibbutz Be’eri.

Hamas announced the death of another captive, an 85-year-old it said had died of a panic attack during an air strike.

With the war about to enter its seventh week, there was no sign of any let-up despite international calls for a ceasefire or at least for humanitarian pauses.

“We are determined to advance our operation,” said Israel’s chief military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.

“It will happen wherever Hamas exists, including in the south of the (Gaza) strip.” REUTERS