By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Hatem Khaled
CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli tanks returned to the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Friday, forcing thousands to evacuate along congested roadways, as Palestinian fighters continued to attack Israeli troops from the ruins, residents and the military said.
Families fled eastern Khan Younis in vehicles and on foot, belongings heaped on donkey carts and motorcycle rickshaws as they made their slow escape along congested roads.
With Israel and Lebanon braced for a possible escalation in fighting, leaders from the United States, Egypt, and Qatar attempted a last-ditch effort to revive efforts to halt the fighting in Gaza, scheduling a new round of talks for Aug. 15.
In recent weeks Israeli forces which swept into nearly the entire Gaza Strip over more than ten months of war have been returning to the ruins of areas where they previously claimed to have driven Hamas fighters out.
In the latest assault, the military dropped leaflets ordering residents and displaced people sheltering in eastern Khan Younis, Gaza’s main southern city, to evacuate from an area that has already seen repeated waves of fighting.
Families packed into buses and cars, many seeking shelter in Al-Mawasi, a sandy stretch of ground along the coast, though some expressed fear that it has been attacked in the past despite being designated as a safe zone by Israeli forces.
“We don’t know where are we going, to the beach to Al-Mawasi, any place we will stay at. There is no safe place here. They struck everywhere, they already struck Al-Mawasi and many people were killed. There is no safety, the safety is with God,” said displaced man Ahmed al-Farra.
Um Raed Abu Elyan said she and her family were “running from the fire, we are running with our children from fear”.
Asked where would she go she replied: “God knows, we are walking now. They said to go to humanitarian areas, but there is no safe place here in Gaza. It is all destroyed and damaged.”
The Israeli military said troops hit dozens of targets belonging to Hamas militants in Khan Younis and Rafah close to the Egyptian border, seizing arms depots, destroying infrastructure and killing dozens of fighters equipped with weapons including rocket propelled grenades.
CEASEFIRE TALKS
There was no immediate detail on what was expected from the meeting called for Aug. 15 to discuss a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal. Previous talks have failed to yield a ceasefire since a single week-long truce last November.
Israel’s prime minister’s office said a delegation would be sent to the talks but declined to give further details. There was no immediate comment from Hamas, whose newly appointed overall leader Yahya Sinwar is believed to run the battle, possibly from the tunnels of Gaza.
The mediators are anxious to revive the effort to halt the fighting in Gaza with fears growing of a possible broader conflict in the region. Iran has vowed to retaliate after Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran and Israel killed a top commander of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in a strike on a Beirut suburb.
A Hamas response to the latest proposal for talks “needs to be studied carefully with its allies. If Israel was serious about reaching a ceasefire, they could have simply accepted the proposal Hamas agreed to,” said one Palestinian official familiar with the mediation effort.
Israel launched its assault on Gaza aiming to wipe out Hamas after the group’s fighters launched an assault on Israeli towns on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and capturing more than 250 hostages according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, Israel has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to figures from health officials in the enclave, who say thousands of others are feared dead under the rubble.
Israel says it has killed or incapacitated more than 14,000 Hamas fighters, roughly half the number it estimated it faced at the start of the war, and broke the group’s organised fighting structure.
But Palestinians say that despite the near total devastation of Gaza Israel has failed to crush Hamas, with fighters able to mount guerrilla attacks and ambushes even as Israel prepares for war on a possible second front on the Lebanese border.
In the Central Gaza Strip, residents and Hamas media said Israeli tanks had advanced into the western area of Al-Nuseirat, one of Gaza’s main historic refugee camps.
The territory’s health ministry said Israeli military strikes in central and southern parts of the enclave had killed at least eight Palestinians so far on Friday.
(Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Hatem Khaled in Gaza; Editing by Peter Graff)
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