Witnesses in the Gaza Strip said that Israeli tanks entered a neighborhood on the outskirts of Gaza City on Monday, the French agency AFP reported.
Sources cited by AFP stated that Israeli forces cut off the Salahedine highway, which connects the north and south of the Gaza Strip.
EFE also reported the presence of Israeli tanks in the main artery of the Palestinian enclave.
According to the Spanish agency, Israeli soldiers control the territory from the eastern border of the enclave to the Salahedine highway, in the direction of Gaza City.
Located southeast of Gaza, al-Zeitoun, which normally has more than 130,000 residents, is the city’s largest neighborhood, but the area attacked by Israeli tanks on Sunday is relatively sparsely populated.
The tanks, as well as the Israeli air force, bombed the main road for about a kilometer, leaving large craters that made it impassable, according to witnesses.
The Israeli tanks were placed in two sectors of the Salahedine road, one at the Martyrs’ Crossing, located 1.5 kilometers from the Israeli border, and the other two kilometers from the border, a source told AFP.
Witnesses did not report any clashes with Hamas fighters, the French agency added.
Israel announced on Friday that the offensive against the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas had entered a second phase and that it would expand ground operations, after two weeks of intense bombing.
Asked if he could confirm the arrival of troops on the Salahedin road, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari avoided giving details in a press conference and stated that they were “making gradual progress.”
“Offensive activity will intensify depending on the stages of the war and its objectives,” he stated, quoted by EFE.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed to have hit 600 targets in Gaza in the last 24 hours.
The targets include weapons depots, dozens of anti-tank missile launchers and hideouts of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
The ongoing war followed an unprecedented incursion by the Islamist group Hamas into Israel on October 7, which Israeli authorities said left more than 1,400 dead.
Hamas also kidnapped more than two hundred Israelis and foreigners and holds them hostage in the Gaza Strip, a territory with 2.3 million inhabitants that the Islamist group has controlled since 2007.
Since then, Israel has incessantly bombarded the Gaza Strip, with some ground raids in the north of the territory, in an offensive that, according to Hamas, has caused more than eight thousand deaths.
The international community has called for a truce to allow humanitarian aid to be provided to Gaza’s civilian population.
Israel, the United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization.
*News updated at 9:55 am
Source: TSF
