Israel-Gaza war: 15 Palestinians killed in Israeli strike in central Gaza

He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.

Reporters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military’s instructions.

On Friday, two sections in western Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military, which ordered people to evacuate them saying that militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.

“This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called humanitarian area to about 41 square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” an OCHA report said.

Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced by the 10-month-old Israeli offensive, which has laid waste to much of the enclave.

Ceasefire talks in Doha, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, paused on Friday with negotiators to meet again next week seeking an agreement to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas and free remaining hostages.

The war was triggered on October 7 when the militant Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health authorities. Israel has lost 330 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian dead are fighters.