Gaza
Reuters
Israeli forces fought Palestinian militants in the north and centre of the Gaza Strip on Friday as Khaled Meshaal, a senior official in Gaza’s ruling Hamas movement, said its six-month-old battle with Israel would “break the enemy soon”.
Most Israeli troops have been pulled out of the Palestinian enclave in preparation for an assault on its southernmost city Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering, but fighting has continued in various areas.
A person walks past destroyed buildings, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Khan Younis, Gaza, on 11th April, 2024, in this screengrab from a handout video. PICTURE: UN News/Handout via Reuters/ File photo
Residents of Al-Nusseirat camp in central Gaza said dozens were dead or wounded after Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea that had followed a surprise ground assault on Thursday, and that houses and two mosques had been destroyed.
Health officials said earlier that six people had been killed in strikes on the cinder-block camp, which has housed Palestinian refugee families since 1948, with around 70 wounded, including three Palestinian journalists.
In Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said at least 25 people had been killed and several wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Al-Daraj neighbourhood. Gaza’s health ministry said 89 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli military strikes in the space of 24 hours.
The Israeli military (IDF) said in a statement that it was pursuing “a precise intelligence-based operation” against militants and their infrastructure in central Gaza.
“Over the past day, IDF fighter jets struck over 60 terror targets in the Gaza Strip, including underground launch posts, military infrastructure and sites in which armed terrorists operated,” it said. “In parallel, IDF artillery struck terrorist infrastructure in the central Gaza Strip.”
In a statement, Hamas said Israel’s bombardment in Al-Nusseirat targeted civilian homes and property “after failing to achieve any military accomplishment on the ground or to implement any of its criminal agendas by displacing our people”.
Israel denies deliberately targeting civilians, accusing Hamas of using residential buildings for cover. Hamas denies this.
Meshaal, who lives in exile and heads Hamas’ political office in the diaspora, spoke at an event in Doha, Qatar to mourn members of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s family killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday.
“This is not the final round,” Meshaal said, referring to the current war. “It is an important round on the path of liberating Palestine and defeating the Zionist project.”
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At least 33,634 Palestinians, including 89 in the past 24 hours, have been killed since the Israeli offensive began, Gaza’s health ministry said in an update on Friday, with most of the 2.3 million population displaced and much of the densely populated enclave demolished.
The war began when Hamas led a lightning cross-border attack into southern Israel on 7th October in which 1,200 people were killed and 253 taken hostage. Around 130 are still being held incommunicado in Gaza, Israel says.
Deflecting repeated US calls for restraint, Israel vows to storm Rafah because, it says, significant Hamas combat forces are hiding there after being routed elsewhere.
In the latest sign that an Israeli assault on Rafah could be imminent, warplanes dropped leaflets on a western neighbourhood asking for information about the hostages.
“To residents of Tel Al-Sultan, look carefully around you, the hostages could be somewhere near you. If you want to protect your families and your future, don’t hesitate to provide us with any information about the hostages and their captors,” the leaflets read.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A man pushes a trolley with luggage as he crosses from Gaza to Egypt, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah, Egypt, on 1st February, 2024. PICTURE: Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany/File photo
Meanwhile, the UN refugee chief said on Friday that the prospect of Gazans crossing into Egypt from the border town of Rafah to escape a military assault would make the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible and cause an “atrocious dilemma” for the people fleeing,
Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said “we must fervently do everything” to avoid such an outflow of the Gazan population.
“Another refugee crisis from Gaza into Egypt, I can assure you…would make the resolution of the Palestinian refugee question as a consequence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible,” Grandi told Reuters at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva.
Around 5.6 million Palestinian refugees currently live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, mainly the descendants of those who were forced out or who fled their homes around the 1948 war linked to Israel’s creation.
The fate of Palestinian refugees is one of the thorniest issues in the moribund peace process. Palestinians and Arab states say a deal should include the right of those refugees and their descendants to return, something Israel has always rejected.
Israeli plans to assault Rafah, where more than a million Gazans have been sheltering from military offensive further north, have drawn widespread condemnation.
Even Israel’s closest ally, the United States, has warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the country would face global isolation if it goes ahead.
Grandi said an attack on Rafah may make the movement of Gazans into Egypt “the only option for safety available”.
“This dilemma is unacceptable and the responsibility to avoid this dilemma lies squarely in this particular case with Israel, the occupying power in Gaza,” he said.
The Israeli military says four Hamas battalions remain in the city as well as an unknown number of senior commanders of the Islamist movement.
Grandi said UNHCR was stocking tents and supplies and working with countries in the region on coming up with their own contingency plans for the possible arrival of Gazans.
“We are looking at the region and that the possibility not only of the outflow, but also that the conflict may expand,” Grandi said.
“But I repeat, we must not arrive at that atrocious dilemma, which would be really almost the end of the road for what is really important here: ultimate peace.”
– Additional reporting by HENRIETTE CHACAR in Jerusalem
