RAFAH: Israeli forces battled Palestinian militants Wednesday near the main hospital in Gaza’s second-largest city of Khan Younis, where medics said hundreds of patients and thousands of displaced people were unable to leave because of the fighting.

Israel has ordered residents to leave a swath of downtown Khan Younis that includes Nasser and two smaller hospitals as it pushes ahead with its 3-month-old offensive against Hamas. The United Nations humanitarian office said the area was home to 88,000 Palestinians and was hosting another 425,000 displaced by fighting elsewhere.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders said its staff was trapped inside Nasser Hospital with some 850 patients and thousands of displaced people because the surrounding roads were inaccessible or too dangerous. Nasser Hospital is one of only two hospitals in southern Gaza that can still treat critically ill patients, the group said. Gaza’s Health Ministry also said the hospital had been isolated.

The Israeli military said its forces were battling militants inside Khan Younis after completing their encirclement of the city the day before. It said aircraft were striking targets as part of the operations there and had also targeted suspected militants in central and northern Gaza.

Thousands of people fled south from Khan Younis on Tuesday toward the town of Rafah. The U.N. says some 1.5 million people — around two-thirds of Gaza’s population — are crowded into shelters and tent camps in and around Rafah, which is on the border with Egypt.

Even there, Palestinians have found little safety, with Israel regularly carrying out strikes in and around the town. Palestinian witnesses said that in recent days Israeli soldiers and tanks had pushed into parts of Muwasi, a sandy area along the coast that Israel had declared a safe zone, where tens of thousands of people were living in tents without basic services.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says the offensive has killed at least 25,490 people — the majority women and children — and wounded another 63,354. Its count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. U.N. officials have expressed fears that even more people could die from disease, with at least one-quarter of the population facing starvation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead with the offensive until “complete victory” against Hamas, which started the war with its assault across the border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and abducting another 250.

Netanyahu says Israel is also committed to returning the over 100 hostages that remain in captivity after most of the others were freed in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners during a November cease-fire.

Families of the hostages are also calling for a deal, and have staged increasingly aggressive protests against Israel’s leaders, even interrupting a parliamentary committee meeting Monday. Egypt and Qatar were working on a new agreement, but officials say the gap between the two sides is still wide.

In Israel, bitter political divisions that were set aside after the Oct. 7 attack have begun to reemerge, with Netanyahu facing widespread anger and protests over the failure to prevent the attack and the plight of the hostages.

Hamas was still attacking Israeli forces, even in some of the most devastated areas, and firing rockets into Israel. An attack Monday near the border killed 21 Israeli soldiers, the military’s biggest loss of life in a single attack since Oct. 7.

Israeli media said the troops were working to create an informal buffer zone about a kilometer (half a mile) wide along the border to prevent militants from attacking Israeli communities near Gaza. The military said the operation was aimed at providing security for those communities but has declined to say if it plans to carve out an official buffer zone.

The United States, which has provided essential military and diplomatic support for the offensive, has said it is opposed to any attempt by Israel to shrink Gaza’s territory.

But President Joe Biden’s administration has also urged Israel to scale back military operations and facilitate the delivery of more aid — with limited success. And Netanyahu has outright rejected calls from the U.S. and much of the international community for postwar plans that include the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.

LAGOS: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said Global South is about a “mindset, a solidarity and a self-reliance” and without the advancement of the Global South, the world is not going to see planetary progress.

Addressing the Nigerian Institute Of International Affairs (NIIA) here on India and the Global South, he said the global agenda today is on promoting rebalancing and multipolarity, thereby restoring the world to its natural diversity.

The global conversation today is focussing “on the advancement of the Global South because without the advancement of the Global South, we are not going to see planetary progress,” Jaishankar said.

However, this global conversation, the minister said, by its very nature is constantly distracted.

Some crisis happens, some big event happens, some other agenda comes in place. And the global conversation then boggles, it goes off track. People lose that sense of focus about what are the priorities, he said.

“So one of the big achievements of our (India’s) G20 presidency was that, after some experience with a very polarised divided world, which was very much, I would say, focused on one particular region…we were able to bring back the attention of the Global South,” the minister said.

Global South is about “a mindset, a solidarity and a self-reliance”, he said.

Jaishankar said, “Global South, most of all, is a mind set. Those who have it, will have it. Those who don’t have it, will never get it. It is a mind set, which has some core principles.”

“These are principles from our habits, from our political culture, from the way we have practised international relations…For example, non-intervention. For example, non-interference or being non-judgmental, or non-alliance,” he added.

Global South, the EAM said, is also about solidarity. “Global South means having a heart. Global South means willing to share,” Jaishankar said.

Elaborating, he said when India was still vaccinating people, it started supplying vaccines to 100 other countries in the world.

“And I compare it to Global North, where there were countries sitting on vaccines eight times the number of the population, and they won’t give it to a small island next to them. That is the difference between Global South and Global North,” Jaishankar said.

The transformation over the last decade, the minister said, has “enabled India to be an example, a partner and a contributor.”

The minister also said the simple principle that must guide global governance, conversations and debates, is a conviction that no one should be left behind.

“And when we speak about no one being left behind. I think the welfare of Africa is particularly important. In fact, I will say, the rise of Africa is even more crucial because in a changing global order, we have seen growth in continents, once they got decolonised, that growth over a period of time, created a rebalancing — of political rebalancing and economic rebalancing,” Jaishankar said.

“And that rebalancing today is creating a world of a multipolar nature, where middle powers and perhaps others to regional organisations would have a fairer and more equitable say in how the world is strong,” he added.

So the global agenda, the minister said, in many ways, today is about restoring the world to its natural diversity. Because the world was diverse, the world is diverse. It was distorted by the period of Western domination.

“And in a post colonial world today, restoring that natural diversity is actually our collective objective,” he said.

Jaishankar said contemporary challenges emanate from old forms of domination as well as new economic concentration.

Today, many of those who dominated the world for the last 200 to 300 years, continue to do so with new instruments, with new regimes, with different techniques, he said.

Jaishankar also said the old “world order continues obstinately because those who are in the driving seat, don’t want to create more seats for other people…”

Jaishankar arrived in Nigeria in the concluding leg of his two-nation tour to Uganda and Nigeria. He arrived in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Sunday after attending the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Uganda.