Israeli forces revealed this Wednesday that they have expanded their ground offensive in the Gaza Strip to densely populated urban refugee camps in the central region of this enclave.
“We have expanded the fighting to an area known as the central fields,” Israel’s military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said at a news conference.
The new combat zone, announced by Israeli forces, threatens to cause more destruction in a war that Israel says will last “many months” while maintaining the goal of destroying the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, the Associated Press (AP) reported. .
Israeli forces have been engaged in intense urban fighting in northern Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis, pushing Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas in search of refuge.
Despite US calls for Israel to reduce civilian casualties and international pressure for a ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military is escalating fighting.
“We say to the Hamas terrorists: we see you and we will get to you,” Netanyahu said.
Israel’s offensive is one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than 20,900 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, were killed, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. The same source stated that 240 people were killed in the last 24 hours.
The UN human rights office stressed, in turn, that the continuous shelling in central Gaza has claimed the lives of more than 100 Palestinians since Christmas Eve, recalling that Israel ordered some residents to move there.
Residents of central Gaza described intense shelling and airstrikes that rocked the Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij camps. These cities host Palestinians expelled from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war, along with their descendants.
The Israeli military ordered residents to withdraw from a strip of territory in central Gaza, urging them to move to nearby Deir al-Balah.
The U.N. humanitarian office said the area designated for evacuation was home to nearly 90,000 people before the war and is now home to more than 61,000 displaced people, mainly from the north.
The military later stated that they were operating in Bureij and claimed that they had located a Hamas training camp.
The telecommunications outage announced by Paltel follows similar outages throughout much of the war. NetBlocks, a group that tracks internet outages, confirmed that network connectivity in Gaza was again disrupted and “will likely leave most residents ‘offline’.”
Israel has been at war with Hamas, supported by Iran, since October 7, when commandos from the Palestinian Islamist group invaded the south of the country from the Gaza Strip. The attack left 1,200 dead, according to Israeli authorities.
Source: TSF
