Fighting has escalated in Gaza’s second largest city Khan Younis As Israeli airstrikes rain down across the enclave, forcing Palestinians to flee to increasingly crowded areas on the territory’s southern edge where there is no promised security as the war enters its third month.

“We are talking about carpet bombing entire neighborhoods and apartment blocks,” Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah in southern Gaza, said on Thursday after heavy shelling overnight.

The Israeli army “ordered in a threatening tone to move to Rafah because it was safe,” he said, but homes were “destroyed.”

“[These strikes] are not concentrated in one area of ​​Rafah…several locations were attacked, which only caused waves of fear and concern that confirm what people have been talking about and expressing before – there is literally no safe place in the Gaza Strip, including the areas that Israel classified as safe.”

After more than two months of war that began on October 7, Mahmoud said that “the mood of these more than 60 days was one of death, destruction and displacement.”

“We are talking about more than 60 days of constant movement and flight for their lives from one place to another, from the far northern part of the city of Beit Hanoon in the Gaza Strip to the far south near Rafah, where many people are packed and squeezed.”

“Alarming levels of hunger”

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) said households in northern Gaza were facing “alarming levels of hunger.”

At least 97 percent of households in northern Gaza have “inadequate food intake,” with nine out of 10 people going an entire day and night without food.

In the southern governorates, a third of households reported severe or very severe hunger, and 53 percent experienced moderate hunger.

“The Palestinians lack everything they need to survive,” Mahmoud said.

During their offensive in the south, Israeli forces have attacked several refugee camps, including Jabalia camp in the north and al-Maghazi camp in the center. The attack in Jabalia killed 22 relatives of Al Jazeera journalist Momin Alshrafi, including his father, mother, three siblings and children.

According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, 60 percent of the wounded require urgent medical treatment abroad, indicating the collapse of Gaza’s health sector.

“Occupation forces are deliberately arresting and mistreating the sick and wounded, including medics on our crews, and we are on the brink of a health and environmental disaster in the Gaza Strip,” it said in a statement.

When will it end?

As the death toll rises amid the humanitarian catastrophe, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told officials in Israel’s War Cabinet last week that US President Joe Biden’s administration believes the war should end in weeks, not months, aAccording to the Wall Street Journal,

Israeli officials, in turn, expressed interest in a return to normality, particularly in the interests of economic stability, but offered no guarantees, the report said.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel could occupy part of the Gaza Strip indefinitely to create a “buffer zone,” a move that would put him on a collision course with regional allies and the United States.

There are also conflicting reports about whether Israeli troops have surrounded Gaza’s Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s home in Khan Younis.

Late Wednesday, Netanyahu said it was “only a matter of time before we get him” and that Israeli soldiers had surrounded his home.

But military spokesman Daniel Hagari later said that Sinwar’s homeland was the entire “Khan Younis area” and gave no indication that any specific location had been surrounded.

Three names are at the top of Israel’s most wanted men: Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades; his deputy, Marwan Issa; and Sinwar.