Khan Yunis
Khan Yunis is the second-largest city in the Gaza Strip and the capital of the Khan Yunis Governorate, located roughly 25 kilometers south of Gaza City. It has been a persistent focal point of IDF operations since October 2023 and remains an active theater of Israeli strikes as of June 2026.
Khan Yunis sits in the southern Gaza Strip and serves as the administrative capital of its eponymous governorate. Before the current conflict, the governorate's population was approximately 400,000. The city's origins trace to a 14th-century caravanserai built by the Mamluk emir Yunis al-Nawruzi in 1387–88, and it grew substantially after 1948 when a large refugee camp was established on its outskirts, housing displaced populations primarily from the Beersheba and Negev regions.
From an Israeli security perspective, Khan Yunis has long been significant as a hub of Hamas military infrastructure. The city and its surrounding areas hosted extensive tunnel networks, weapons storage, and command nodes. IDF ground operations entered Khan Yunis in force during the winter of 2023–24, targeting Hamas's military wing and the network that sheltered senior Hamas figures including Yahya Sinwar, who was ultimately killed in the Rafah area in October 2024.
Operations in and around Khan Yunis have continued into 2026. On 6 June 2026, the IDF struck a building attributed to the Za'arab family on Al-Attar Street in the western part of the city, in the Muwasi coastal area. The strike was preceded by an evacuation warning — a standard IDF procedure intended to reduce civilian casualties before a targeted strike. Additional strikes on terror infrastructure in Gaza were reported as anticipated the same evening, indicating that the operational tempo in the southern Gaza Strip remains elevated.
The Muwasi area of western Khan Yunis had previously been designated by Israel as a humanitarian zone, making any military activity there operationally and diplomatically sensitive. The IDF's continued targeting of specific structures in this zone reflects its stated posture that Hamas embeds military assets within civilian and designated-safe areas.
Khan Yunis has suffered extensive physical destruction over the course of the conflict. Large portions of the city's residential and commercial fabric have been damaged or destroyed. The humanitarian situation in the governorate remains severe, though the scope of current conditions is beyond what the present archive can precisely quantify.