AN estimated 150,000 Palestinians are being forced to flee areas of central Gaza, the UN has said, as Israeli forces advance on refugee camps there.
Witnesses and Hamas’s armed wing reported that tanks had reached the eastern outskirts of Bureij camp.
Israel’s military recently expanded its ground offensive to target Bureij and nearby Nuseirat and Maghazi camps.
Israeli bombardment also killed dozens of people across Gaza on Thursday, the health ministry said.
Egypt has confirmed that it has put forward a three-stage proposal to stop the fighting which ends with a ceasefire.
A Hamas delegation is said to have arrived in Cairo to give its response to the plan.
The war was triggered by an unprecedented cross-border attack by Hamas gunmen on southern Israel on 7 October, in which 1,200 people were killed – most of them civilians – and about 240 others taken hostage.
More than 21,300 people have been killed in Gaza – mostly children and women – during 11 weeks of fighting, according to the health ministry.
The Israeli military has called for the evacuation of a strip of land stretching across central Gaza that includes Bureij and Nuseirat camps, and told the almost 90,000 residents and 61,000 displaced people in the affected areas to move southwards to the town of Deir al-Balah.
However, the UN warned on Thursday that they had nowhere to go because Deir al-Balah was already overcrowded, with several hundred thousand displaced people sheltering there.
The UN says that Rafah – which had already become the most densely populated town in Gaza – has seen about 100,000 new arrivals in recent days as Israeli ground forces have pushed into new neighbourhoods.
