Thousands of Gazans Flee South as IDF Hunts Hamas Operatives
Israel says it killed head of Hamas weapons development team in airstrike; IDF special forces soldier killed in fighting, bringing military toll to 32 in ground offensive.
Thousands of Gazans on Wednesday again made use of a humanitarian corridor opened by Israel to leave the northern Gaza Strip as Israel pressed ahead with its offensive to oust the Hamas terror group.
“The northern Gaza Strip area is a fierce combat zone, and time is running out to evacuate it,” IDF Arabic language spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X, calling on Gazans to “join the hundreds of thousands” who have evacuated already.
The passageway was open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The IDF published video footage showing the movement of civilians southward, many of whom could be seen carrying white flags and holding their hands in the air.
Crowd sizes appear to match those seen Tuesday, when an estimated 15,000 people moved south, compared to 5,000 on Monday and 2,000 on Sunday, said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The pace of Palestinian civilians fleeing the combat zone in northern Gaza has picked up as Israel’s air and ground campaign there intensifies, UN monitors said Wednesday.
The civilians are able to move during a four-hour window set daily by the Israeli military that assures safe passage from Gaza City and its surroundings toward the south of the Strip, where there are fewer airstrikes. Most of those fleeing are children, the elderly and people with disabilities, the UN agency said. Many arrived on foot with minimal belongings.
The densely populated northern area of Gaza, specifically Gaza City and neighborhoods, are the current focus of Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians remain in the combat area, many sheltering at hospitals or UN schools. Some said they were deterred from moving south because of dire humanitarian conditions in the evacuation zone and ongoing Israeli airstrikes across Gaza, including the south.
Israel has accused Hamas of seeking to keep civilians in the northern part of Gaza to use them as human shields.
Hamas has accused the IDF of firing on or striking convoys of those evacuating, charges that Israel has strongly denied. The IDF instead has provided evidence that Hamas operatives are trying to prevent civilians from moving south, setting up roadblocks and purportedly even firing on convoys.
Fighting and airstrikes continued on Wednesday, and the Israel Defense Forces announced that Sgt. First Class Jonathan Chazor, a soldier in the Air Force’s elite Shaldag unit, was killed fighting Hamas terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip a day earlier.
Chazor, 22, was from the northern community of Katzir.
His death brought the toll of slain soldiers in Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza to 32, and 350 since Oct. 7.
Also on Wednesday, Israel claimed to have killed one of the top figures in Hamas’s weapons production apparatus in an overnight airstrike.
The military and Shin Bet said that Muhsin Abu Zina was “one of the leaders of weapons production” for Hamas, specializing in manufacturing “strategic weapons
The military said it has also killed several Hamas operatives in strikes on anti-tank and rocket launching positions.
The IDF also said troops have found and destroyed some 130 tunnel shafts in Gaza since the ground operation began last month. Troops of the Combat Engineering Forces have been working to clear routes for ground forces to maneuver, locate and destroy Hamas assets, including tunnels and rocket launchers.
The IDF said forces found a number of tunnel entrances next to a structure with car batteries, which are thought to be hooked up to the tunnel’s air filtration system.
Forces of the Nahal Infantry Brigade meanwhile captured a Hamas training camp in northern Gaza. A staging ground within the camp was also found, where Hamas operatives had prepared weapons and food to carry out an attack, the military said. Within the camp, several tunnel entrances were also found. They were all destroyed.
According to a Channel 13 report, an unnamed official said during a military briefing Wednesday that Israel will likely see “achievements” regarding the tunnels “in the coming days,” and that if troops need to, “they will enter them.”
“Hamas has descended into an advanced and fortified underground system and built a number of protective mechanisms. Some of the tunnels can be attacked from the air,” the official reportedly said. “The ground entry of the IDF exposes the enemy’s infrastructure and the engineering corps has begun with the destruction of shafts and tunnels.”
Meanwhile, international pressure has continued to mount regarding the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
Hundreds of trucks carrying aid have been allowed to enter Gaza from Egypt since Oct. 21. But humanitarian workers say the aid is far short of mounting needs.
Emily Callahan, an American nurse who was in Gaza with Doctors without Borders (MSF), described the reality in southern Gaza up till a week ago when she managed to cross through Rafah into Egypt.
She had evacuated to Khan Younis, where she shared a shelter with 35,000 internally displaced in a single complex.
“There were children with just massive burns down their faces, down their necks, all over their limbs,” she told CNN.
Callahan said food and water were desperately low, and the MSF staff had to count calories by the end. “We would have either starved to death or run out of water” were it not for her local staff, she said.
There were four toilets for the tens of thousands of Gazans, she added.
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