Conditions in the city are grim, with little access to running water or sanitation. People are sleeping in the open, and aid workers have largely stopped distributing water and flour because of the intensity of the fighting and Israeli bombardments, U.N. officials have said.
More than 20,000 people have taken refuge at a training center in the city that is designed to shelter one-tenth of that number, according to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Gazans are being pushed into an area that covers less than one-third of the enclave, according to the United Nations.
“The level of human suffering is intolerable,” the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, who visited Gaza on Monday, said in a statement. She added: “It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible.”
Before the conflict, nearly 90,000 people were registered at the Khan Younis refugee camp, one of eight run by the United Nations in Gaza. The camps were initially set up to receive many of the 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, which broke out when five Arab nations invaded after Israel declared independence.
They have since become permanent dwellings, and the Khan Younis camp is in practice part of the wider metropolitan area.
Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner, Vivian Yee, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Courtney Brooks, Iyad Abuheweila, Abu Bakr Bashir, Peter Baker, Talya Minsberg, Karoun Demirjian, Arijeta Lajka and Alexander Cardia.