The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, forcing more Palestinians to flee their homes and shelters, as the United States and others tried to salvage sputtering talks that could ease regional tensions and stop the 10-month war.
Thousands of civilians were already on the move, responding to Israeli orders issued a day earlier to leave several neighborhoods in central Gaza. Most of them have been displaced multiple times over the course of the war.
Mohammed Aborjela was among those who fled the city of Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, after he received a phone message from the Israeli military on Wednesday afternoon warning that it would act “forcefully” against Hamas militants in the area.
Mr. Aborjela, 28, packed up the few belongings he had and headed to Al-Mawasi, a coastal area that Israel has declared a humanitarian zone, but that has come under attack numerous times. Hours after he arrived there, he said, shelling from tanks reached tents where people were sheltering.
“The tanks got close to us,” Mr. Aborjela said. “And they started shelling the people even though it is supposed to be a safe zone.”
The Israeli military, asked whether its tanks had fired toward Al-Mawasi, said it “takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.” It said that Israeli forces had “intensified” operations in the Deir al-Balah area after intelligence indicated the presence of Hamas infrastructure and fighters on the outskirts there and in the southern city of Khan Younis.
As Palestinians in Gaza were fleeing, Israeli and American officials were headed to Cairo to resume talks aimed at securing an elusive cease-fire agreement that would free the remaining hostages in Gaza.
President Biden, in a phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday, “stressed the urgency of bringing the cease-fire and hostage-release deal to closure and discussed upcoming talks in Cairo to remove any remaining obstacles,” the White House said in a statement.
Hours later, Omer Dostri, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, confirmed that an Israeli delegation led by David Barnea, the head of the Mossad intelligence agency, and Ronen Bar, who leads the Shin Bet domestic security service, was heading to Cairo for talks.
Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, was already in Cairo on Thursday and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, was also expected to attend the talks, according to a Western official.
The negotiations in Cairo were expected to focus on security arrangements along Gaza’s border with Egypt and on reopening the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, according to an Israeli official and another official familiar with the matter. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The planned talks came after Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Israel, Egypt and Qatar this week to push for an American proposal intended to bridge the differences between Israel and Hamas over a cease-fire deal. Mr. Blinken declared that Israel had accepted the plan, the details of which have not been made public, and that it was now up to Hamas to accept the deal.
But Hamas accused the United States of bowing to what it called “new conditions” from Israel, and officials familiar with the talks said the American proposal left some major disputes between the parties unresolved. Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas have continued to trade blame for obstructing progress, each accusing the other of repeatedly making new demands.
One main focus of disagreement is Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on maintaining an Israeli military presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Mr. Netanyahu has argued that the area has served as a main conduit for weapons smuggling into Gaza, and that abandoning it would allow Hamas to quickly rearm.
Egypt and Hamas strongly object to continued Israeli control of the area, and have called for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israeli security officials have suggested that other solutions can be found.
An Israeli official with knowledge of the talks, who was not authorized to speak about them publicly, cautioned that few people really know what is being said behind closed doors, and that talks were continuing at various levels.
In Israel, pressure for the government to agree to a cease-fire has risen since the military announced this week that the bodies of six hostages had been recovered from a tunnel in Gaza.
On Thursday, the Hostages Family Forum, a group representing relatives of the captives, said the families had been shown autopsy reports that bullets had been discovered in the bodies, suggesting the hostages “were taken alive and executed.”
An Israeli military spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter for the families, confirmed that autopsies showed “marks suggestive of gunshot wounds.”
But the spokesman said the results were preliminary and it had not been determined whether the hostages died of gunshot wounds. Hamas had previously said that the hostages were killed in an Israeli military strike.
The United States, Egypt and Qatar have pushed for a cease-fire in the hope that it will not only stop the bloodshed in Gaza, but reduce the risk of a wider regional war pitting Israel against Iran and its proxy forces, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
Regional tensions escalated last month when an explosion in Tehran killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, hours after a Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate for both attacks.
In apparent effort to lower tensions, a key mediator in the cease-fire talks, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister, plans travel to Iran in the coming days for talks with senior officials, Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported on Thursday.
But for Gazans, the diplomatic maneuvers have had no material effect on their lives, which have often been consumed by the need to flee from one dangerous place to another, and to find scarce shelter, food, water and medicine.
Dr. Iyad al-Jabri, a surgeon and administrator at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, said that seven people wounded from the shelling in Al-Mawasi were brought to the medical facility. Hundreds of families also hurried to the hospital, seeking shelter there, in the wake of the latest evacuation orders, he said.
“In this area there is a ground invasion and we have to think, ‘Where can we go, what are we going to do?’” Dr. al-Jabri said. “So we are running around seeing where can we send our patients in case, God forbid, we are ordered to leave this hospital.”
Majdi Nassar, 33, a taxi driver before the war who fled to Deir al-Balah from the northern Gaza Strip, said he has had to flee eight times with his family over the last 10 months, most recently last week.
He said he was fleeing only for the safety of the children with him.
“I myself no longer care,” he said. “Death is no longer the worst scenario. This life is much worse. The scene of thousands of people running for their lives every day is unbearable.”
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