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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed the military to plan for the evacuation of the more than 1.3 million people the United Nations estimates are in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
In a statement, his office said that it was not possible to both eliminate Hamas and leave “four Hamas battalions in Rafah.”
Here’s what you need to about this and other developments in the Israel-Hamas war:
Where will the civilians go?: Rafah is the last major population center in Gaza not occupied by the Israel Defense Forces and it has rapidly become home to a huge population of displaced Palestinians. Satellite images showed this week how a tent city has swelled in size in just a few weeks. CNN has also previously reported on Palestinian civilians who followed evacuation orders being killed by Israeli strikes, underscoring the reality that evacuation zones and warning alerts from the Israeli military haven’t guaranteed safety for civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where Palestinians have no safe place to escape Israeli bombs.
