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Residents say there has been heavy fighting in Jabalia in northern Gaza, where Israeli tanks and troops are conducting a new ground operation.

The Israeli military said it had killed 20 “terrorists” there over the past day, and that one of its soldiers had also been killed in the north.

Hamas said its fighters had targeted Israeli forces in Jabalia and its refugee camp, while the Hamas-run civil defence agency said Israeli strikes had killed 19 people.

Civilians in Jabalia and nearby Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia have been told to evacuate south by the military, which said on Sunday that intelligence indicated Hamas was trying to “rebuild its operational capabilities” in the region.

It warned that the operation would involve “systematic strikes and the radical destruction of terrorist structures”.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said on Tuesday evening that Israeli forces were besieging the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia and that it would run out of fuel within hours.

It also said patients and medical personnel had been asked to evacuate the hospital, as well as the nearby Indonesian and al-Awda hospitals.

Israeli forces launched a campaign in Gaza to destroy Hamas in response to the group's unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken as hostages.

More than 41,960 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory's health ministry

This is the third time Israeli forces have gone into Jabalia and its refugee camp over the past year, with the last operation in May displacing tens of thousands of people, killing hundreds and causing widespread destruction.

On Monday, Jabalia resident Asmaa Tayeh told the ����ý that she and her family had had to leave their home for the fourth time in a year.

They have returned to her grandparents’ house in the al-Nasr district of Gaza City and, like many civilians in the north, are reluctant to move south, fearing that if they do they will not ever make it home.

Despite Israeli assurances, Palestinians fear the military is planning to implement a plan, proposed by the former head of Israel’s national security council, to completely empty northern Gaza of the 300,000 to 500,000 civilians believed to be living there.

According to Giora Eiland’s plan, the north would then be declared a “closed military zone” and the estimated 5,000 Hamas fighters there would be put under siege in order to force the group to release the remaining Israeli hostages.

“The situation is getting so dangerous that we don’t have so much hope that we’ll go back,” Asmaa said.

The Israeli military also ordered civilians in parts of the southern city of Khan Younis to evacuate after Hamas fired rockets towards Israel from there on Monday, lightly wounding two women in Kfar Chabad in central Israel.

In central Gaza, the civil defence agency said 17 people, including children, were killed when a three-storey home in Bureij refugee camp was hit in an Israeli strike overnight.

Medics at a hospital in nearby Nuseirat refugee camp confirmed the death toll, according to AFP news agency.

The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas operatives in the camp and that it “conducted a precise strike on a structure from which a terrorist cell planned terror activities”.

Additional reporting by the ����ý Diplomatic Correspondent Paul Adams in London