Israel’s military said on Thursday that it was fighting in neighborhoods near the heart of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, apparently expanding its campaign against Hamas in a week when Israel has faced mounting diplomatic and legal pressure over its war effort.
Around 815,000 people have already left Rafah as a result of the fighting and Israeli warnings to flee, the United Nations said this week, amounting to well over half the number of Palestinians who had crowded into the city in recent months to escape fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
sraeli forces had dismantled several tunnels and killed fighters in “close-quarters encounters,” the military said. It was not possible to independently verify Israel’s account of the fighting. Hamas did not immediately comment on the fighting on Thursday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said that an assault on Rafah was essential to defeating remaining Hamas battalions and dismantling the group’s infrastructure in Gaza, including tunnels beneath the city. Israel also wants to destroy tunnels running from Gaza into Egypt beneath a buffer strip on the southern edge of the territory. Israeli forces are advancing along the buffer strip, known in Israel as the Philadelphi Corridor, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project. The Israeli military said it would not comment on the location of its forces.
Most of the Palestinians who have fled Rafah in recent weeks have moved to a zone that includes the cities of Khan Younis and Deir al Balah and the coastal village of Al-Mawasi. The Israeli authorities said they had set up and equipped humanitarian zones for displaced people.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, said this week that the areas newly displaced people were arriving in were desperately overcrowded and lack the “minimal conditions to provide emergency humanitarian assistance in a safe and dignified manner.”
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said that more than 100 people had been killed in Gaza between Monday and Wednesday, and that hundreds of others had been wounded. It was not possible to corroborate the figures independently.
ut some military analysts have raised questions about whether Israel’s military operation in Rafah can deal a decisive blow to Hamas, saying that many of the group’s fighters, wary of engaging in a direct confrontation with a superior military force, had likely moved out of the city before the long-anticipated incursion began.