The Israeli army on Tuesday intensified operations against the Islamist group Hamas in southern Gaza, where witnesses reported violent fighting, raising fears of an “even more hellish scenario” for civilians, according to the UN.
Engaged since October 27 in a ground offensive in the north of the besieged Palestinian territory, the Israeli army has expanded ground operations to the entire Gaza Strip, almost two months after the start of the war triggered by a Hamas attack against Israel .
Since the resumption of fighting on December 1, after a seven-day truce, the Israeli army has intensively bombed southern Gaza, killing and wounding many inhabitants of the region and civilians who have taken refuge there, trapped in an increasingly more restricted.
Witnesses informed Agence France-Presse (AFP) of violent fighting since Monday night near Khan Yunis, the new epicenter of tensions, and of air attacks towards Rafah, in the extreme south of the territory.
The Palestinian Wafa news agency also reported several deaths in an attack in Gaza City further north.
Also this morning, Hamas’s armed wing announced that it had fired rockets at Beersheva, a large Israeli city in the Negev Desert.
International organizations have warned of the risks to civilians in Gaza, where “all telecommunications services” are paralyzed due to “a cut in the main fiber networks on the Israeli side”, according to the Palestinian telecommunications group Paltel.
“An even more infernal scenario is about to unfold, to which humanitarian operations may not be able to respond,” said the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian Territories, Canadian Lynn Hastings.
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric, who arrived in the Gaza Strip on Monday, condemned the “intolerable” suffering of the population.
“What shocked me the most were the children who have horrible injuries and who have also lost their parents and have no one to take care of them,” he added, stressing that the civilians “have nowhere to go.”
According to the UN, 1.8 million people, about three-quarters of Gaza’s total population, have already been displaced by the war.
“We saw what happened in northern Gaza. This cannot serve as a model for the south,” added the regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Ahmed Al-Mandhari.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday that he had received a notification from the Israeli military ordering the organization to “remove” its supplies from a medical warehouse in the southern Gaza Strip in a within 24 hours, “as field operations permit.” unusable.”
But the Israeli defense body that oversees civilian activities in the Palestinian Territories denied asking the WHO to evacuate the warehouse in southern Gaza.
However, the Israeli army has asked for support from international humanitarian organizations to “help create infrastructure” in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area in the southern Gaza Strip, between Khan Younis and Rafah, where Israel asks civilians that they be evacuated.
On Monday, the army said it was acting “with force” in Khan Younis, where it dropped leaflets in some neighborhoods warning that “a terrible attack is imminent” and ordering residents to leave the area.
Dozens of Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers entered the southern Palestinian territory, near Khan Younis, where some civilians are located, witnesses told AFP.
In a devastated neighborhood of Rafah, a city on the border with Egypt where the Israeli military said it was trying to destroy Hamas’s underground tunnels, survivors searched through the rubble on Monday.
The Hamas Health Ministry declared on Monday that 15,899 people, 70% of whom were women, children and adolescents, had been killed since the start of Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip on October 7.
According to Israel, Hamas killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on October 7 and about 240 people were kidnapped and taken to the small Palestinian territory.
Source: TSF
