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The Israeli military said it was aware of reports of 15 people
killed in a Gaza airstrike and was looking into them.
Israel's military spokesperson in Arabic posted instructions on
X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi
district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated
humanitarian zone.
He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and
that the military was preparing to act against them.
Reuters 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 population has 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 Oct. 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.
(Reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; Maayan Lubell in
Jerusalem and Dave Graham in ZurichWriting by Enas Alashray and
Maayan LubellEditing by William Mallard and Frances Kerry)
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