As Israel’s military offensive pushes Palestinian civilians into ever smaller slivers of land, the Israeli military said on Thursday that Hamas militants had fired rockets from inside one of the “humanitarian zones” in the southern Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military posted videos and maps that it said showed rockets being fired towards Israel from within the humanitarian zone, Al-Mawasi. The videos and Israel’s account of them could not immediately be verified. It also was not immediately clear whether Israel would now regard Al-Mawasi, where thousands of people have fled, as a legitimate military target.

An Israeli spokesperson, Major Nir Dinar, said he could not discuss future operations. Palestinians in Gaza were being “updated frequently in various ways” about Israeli military activities, Dinar said.

Aid workers say that hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter in the region surrounding Al-Mawasi near the Egyptian border, where on Wednesday, an Israeli military airstrike killed 18 people in the city of Rafah, according to a television station run by the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas.

Al-Mawasi and Rafah, a city along the border with Egypt, are among the few remaining places Israel’s military has told displaced Palestinians they can seek safety as its military offensive ramps up in southern Gaza.

Aid groups in recent days have said that with shelters in Rafah well beyond capacity, people were setting up tents wherever they could, on the street, in empty lots, or in public buildings, leaving them highly vulnerable.

Rafah has been a last-resort destination for many of the estimated 1.9 million civilians displaced in Gaza, and the only place where any distribution of relief supplies has been carried out in recent days because of intense fighting and restrictions by Israeli forces of movement along main roads elsewhere in the strip. The UN humanitarian office said that limited aid distributions have taken place only in Rafah for the past four days.

Rafah is also home to the only border crossing through which some foreign nationals and gravely injured people have been able to leave Gaza, and where critically needed supplies can enter.

The Israeli military has allowed little aid to enter Gaza, via Rafah, since the war began, including fuel, which hospitals say they desperately need, but which Israel says could be diverted by Hamas.

On Thursday, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli government had decided to allow “a minimal supplement of fuel” into southern Gaza in order “to prevent a humanitarian collapse and the outbreak of epidemics.” It did not specify how much fuel that would be, or when the supplies would be allowed in.

Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Israeli troops had surrounded the home of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. Israeli authorities have said Sinwar masterminded the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7. It was not immediately clear if Israel had confirmed his presence inside the home.

“He can escape, but it is only a matter of time until we reach him,” Netanyahu said.

New York Times News Service