Palestinians flee again as Israel raids Khan Younis

•Surprise attack after pullout •More bodies in hospital grave Palestinians in Khan Younis were forced to flee for a second time on Monday after Israeli troops launched a surprise raid on the east of the city.

Israel abruptly pulled most of its troops out of southern Gaza this month after some of the most intense fighting of the seven-month war. Residents had begun making their way home to previously inaccessible neighborhoods of the enclave’s second-biggest city, finding homes reduced to rubble and unrecovered dead in the streets.

Ahmed Rezik, 42, who was sheltering in a school in the western part of Khan Younis, said: “This morning many families who had left here in the past two weeks to go back home to Abassan in the east came back. They were too frightened. They said tanks pushed into the eastern area of the town and they had to run for their lives.”

More than 34,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been killed by Israeli forces since they invaded on Oct. 7, and thousands more bodies are feared lost in the rubble. In the ruins of what had been Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the biggest in southern Gaza, scores more bodies were recovered on Monday from mass graves discovered after Israeli troops pulled out.

Emergency workers in white hazmat suits dug corpses out of the ground with hand tools and a digger truck. Emergency services said 73 more bodies had been found at the site in the past day, raising the total to 283. Gaza authorities say the bodies recovered so far are from just one of at least three mass graves they have found at the site.

“We expect to find another 200 bodies at the same mass grave in the coming two days before we begin working at the two other cemeteries,” said Hamas government spokesman Ismail Al-Thawabta. He accused Israel of carrying out executions at the hospital and covering up the crimes by burying bodies with a bulldozer.

Relatives took the body of Osama Al-Shoubagy, one of those recovered inside the hospital grounds, to a graveyard on Monday to rebury him next to his sister. “My daughter asked me to visit the grave of her father. It’s tough, but we might find some relief after burying him,” his wife Soumaya said.

Further south there were fresh Israeli attacks on Rafah, and an airstrike damaged solar panels supplying power to a hospital in Nusseirat in central Gaza.