Khan Younis is the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, built around the surviving walls of a Mamluk caravanserai from which it takes its name. The fortified khan was a substantial structure — a large rectangular courtyard with stables, storerooms, and a small mosque — built to shelter travellers and their pack animals on the long road between Egypt and the Levant. Fragments of the walls and gates remained visible into recent years.
The modern city grew up around the khan as a market town, then expanded enormously after 1948 with the arrival of refugees from villages now inside Israel. It has been one of the centres of fighting in the war that began in 2023.