Israel’s evacuation orders in the Gaza Strip now cover two-thirds of the territory, or 246 square kilometers (95 square miles), U.N. humanitarian monitors said Tuesday.
More than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people is now crammed into the town of Rafah on the border with Egypt and surrounding areas, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said the known Palestinian death toll is at 27,478 people after nearly four months of war. A quarter of Gaza’s residents are starving and 85% of the population has been driven from their homes, with hundreds of thousands crammed into makeshift tent camps.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shortly after arriving in the kingdom on Monday. It’s Blinken’s fifth visit to the Middle East since the war in Gaza broke out on Oct. 7, when Hamas stormed into southern Israel. The assault killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and militants abducted around 250 others.
Currently:
— Blinken pushes for progress on Gaza cease-fire-for-hostages deal in meetings with Egyptian mediators
— In Israel, France’s new foreign minister presses for a cease-fire to end ‘the tragedy in Gaza’
— Pennsylvania Capitol protest against US state investing in Israel bonds ends with arrests
— Find more of news agencies’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.
Here’s the latest:
TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli military says that soldiers shot and killed an armed Palestinian man in the West Bank after he threatened them.
Tuesday’s shooting took place at a military post near the city of Nablus. The military didn’t say what the man was armed with or whether he fired any shots. No soldiers were wounded.
The Israeli-occupied West Bank, which the Palestinians want as the main part of their future state, has seen a surge in violence since the start of the war in Gaza.
Israeli forces have carried out nightly arrest raids that often ignite gunbattles with local militants, and Palestinians have carried out a number of attacks targeting Israelis.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says that more than 380 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched the cross-border attack into Israel from Gaza that ignited the war.
The military says its forces try to avoid harming civilians and must make split-second decisions when operating in dangerous areas. The Palestinians and rights groups have long accused Israeli forces of using excessive force and of killing suspects that they could have safely arrested.
JERUSALEM — Israel’s evacuation orders in the Gaza Strip now cover two-thirds of the territory, or 246 square kilometers (95 square miles), United Nations humanitarian monitors said Tuesday.
The affected area was home to 1.78 million Palestinians, or 77% of Gaza’s population, before the Israel-Hamas war erupted on Oct. 7, triggered by a deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Early on in the war, Israel’s military began ordering Palestinians in the northern half of the territory to leave their homes, ostensibly to get out of the way of eventual ground combat. At the same time, Israeli aircraft continued to attack in the southern half, where residents had been told to take refuge. Israel says it only goes after Hamas targets and argues that Hamas is responsible for harm to civilians because it operates from within civilian sites.
Gaza health officials have put the Palestinian death toll in the territory at more than 27,000. They don’t differentiate between combatants and civilians in the count, but have said two-thirds are women and children.