The Israeli military has indicated it could soon launch another major offensive in Rafah and ordered most of the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip evacuated.

The U.N. said Israel killed the people as they were trying to aid injured civilians, and then buried them in a mass grave. Israel said nine were militants.

Israeli strikes across the southern Gaza Strip have killed at least 26 Palestinians overnight, including a senior Hamas political leader and several women and children.

As Israel orders wide new evacuations across the Gaza Strip, Palestinians say they are crushed by exhaustion and hopelessness at the prospect of fleeing once again.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel is establishing a new security corridor across Gaza. In a statement issued Wednesday, he described it as the Morag corridor, using the name of a Jewish settlement that once stood between Rafah and Khan Younis, suggesting it would run between the two southern cities.

Israel says it is targeting Hamas infrastructure, senior officials in renewed fighting; Red Crescent: bodies of 15 health workers recovered after Israeli strike last week

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip is expanding to seize “large areas,” the defense minister said, while officials at hospitals inside the Palestinian territory said that Israeli strikes overnight and into Wednesday had killed more than 40 people, nearly a dozen of them children.

The bodies of more than a dozen aid workers have been recovered in southern Gaza from what a United Nations agency described as a “mass grave,” a week after they went missing following attacks by Israeli forces.