JERUSALEM, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to keep up the fight against Hamas militants, but a United Nations humanitarian team leader said Palestinian civilians in Gaza who honor Israeli evacuation orders cannot be guaranteed they will be safe.

Netanyahu, who visited Israeli troops in northern Gaza on Monday, told lawmakers from his Likud Party that the war was far from over and dismissed what he cast as media speculation his government might call a halt to the fighting.

He said Israel would not succeed in freeing its remaining hostages held by Hamas without applying military pressure.

"We are not stopping. The war will continue until the end, until we finish it, no less," Netanyahu, who has defied international calls for a ceasefire, said during the Gaza visit.

Retaliating against Hamas for its deadly Oct. 7 cross-border rampage, Israel has been under pressure from its closest ally the United States to shift operations in Gaza to a lower-intensity phase and reduce civilian deaths.

But Gemma Connell, a U.N. team leader deployed in Gaza for several weeks now, described what she called a "human chess board" in which thousands of people, displaced many times already, are on the run again and there is no guarantee a destination will be safe.

"There's so little space left here in Rafah that people just don't know where they will go and it really feels like people being moved around a human chessboard because there's an evacuation order somewhere," Connell, who on Monday visited the Deir al-Balah neighborhood in central Gaza.

"People flee that area into another area. But they're not safe there," she told Reuters.

Washington has for weeks pressured Israel to take further steps to minimise civilian harm by designating safe areas and clearing humanitarian routes for people to escape. But the death toll keep rising and Israeli operations have intensified.

Asked for the army's response, a spokesperson said the military has sought to evacuate civilians from areas of fighting but Hamas systematically attempts to prevent that effort. The army spokesperson said the Palestinian militant group uses civilians as human shields, an accusation the group denies.

The spokesperson said the army takes all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.

Photo from Reuters