AN ISRAELI air strike killed at least nine people today in Khan Younis, less than a day after Israel ordered the evacuation of areas in and around the southern Gaza city, raising fears of a fresh ground assault by the Israeli military.

The overnight strike hit a home near the European Hospital, which is inside the zone that Israel said should be evacuated.

The military later announced that the facility itself did not have to be evacuated, but its director said that most patients and medics had already been moved.

Sam Rose, head of planning at UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, said it believes some 250,000 people are in the evacuation zone — over 10 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million — including many who have fled earlier fighting.

He said another 50,000 people living just outside the zone, which covers the eastern half of Khan Younis and a large swathe of the Gaza Strip’s south-east corner, may also choose to leave because the fighting is so close.

Evacuees have been told to move to Muwasi, a coastal area designated by the Israeli army as a safe zone that has become filled with crowded and unsanitary tent camps.

As night fell on Monday, streams of civilians trudged out of the evacuation zone carrying what few possessions they could beside a steady flow of vehicles piled high with furniture and other goods.

“We received a message on our mobile phones” to evacuate, said displaced woman Zeinab Abu Jazar, holding back tears. “Look at these children, how they walk. We did not find a car to ride in.”

Among those killed in today’s air strike were three children and two women, according to records at the Nasser hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken.

The Israeli military sought to justify the latest killing of Palestinian civilians by saying that it had launched retaliatory strikes after the Islamic Jihad militant group fired some 20 projectiles into Israel from Khan Younis on Monday.

There were no reports of casualties or damage from the rocket attack.

Israel launched the war in Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attack, in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and about 250 abducted.

Since then, Israeli military action has left more than 37,900 Gazans dead and largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and basic goods.