Gaza: The streets of Khan Yunis were empty as residents tried to take shelter from shelling and artillery fire.
Residents said Israeli bombing intensified overnight, killing and wounding civilians in the north and east of Khan Yunis. Some Palestinians described lucky escapes after their homes were destroyed in an overnight air strike on the Al-Amal neighbourhood of Khan Yunis.
Palestinian medics said hospitals were overflowing with dead and wounded, many of them women and children, and supplies were running out.
The health ministry said air strikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed at least six people and wounded 14 others. But since Oct 7, Israeli air strikes and a ground offensive that have killed more than 16,200 people, mostly women and children, according to the government.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of displaced people driven out of the north were seeking shelter in the dwindling number of places in the south designated as safe areas by Israel.
On the other hand, the head of the UN has warned that he expects “public order to completely break down soon due to the desperate conditions” in Gaza, currently under relentless Israeli bombardment.
The humanitarian conditions amid the Israel-Hamas war are “fast deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a letter to the president of the Security Council.
Guterres also warned that the war in the Gaza Strip threatened to “aggravate existing threats to international peace and security”.
Last week, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told officials in Israel’s war cabinet that the Biden administration believed the war should end in weeks, not months.