Dozens of Israeli tanks entered the besieged southern Gaza Strip on Monday, where the army continues its deadly strikes and expands its ground offensive against Hamas despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Engaged since October 27 in a ground offensive in the north, the Israeli army is now extending its ground operations throughout the Gaza Strip, almost two months after the start of the war triggered by the bloody attack on Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel.
Since the resumption of fighting on 1er December after seven days of truce, the army intensely shelled the south of the territory, causing many deaths and injuries among the inhabitants of this region and the civilians who had come to take refuge there, trapped in an increasingly restricted perimeter .
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric, who arrived in Gaza on Monday, denounced on the social network X the “intolerable” suffering of the population.
“I reiterate our urgent call for civilians to be protected under the laws of war and for aid to enter unhindered,” she wrote.
A cut road
The army said on Monday it was acting “with force” in Khan Younes, a large town in the south of the Gaza Strip where some of the displaced civilians are crowded.
Dozens of Israeli tanks, troop transports and bulldozers entered southern Gaza on Monday, near this town near the border with Egypt, witnesses told AFP.
Amine Abou Hola, 59, said that these vehicles had entered “to a depth of two kilometers” in the village of al-Qarara, northeast of Khan Younes.
“The tanks are now on the Salaheddine road”, which crosses the small coastal territory from north to south, and are cutting the road “firing bullets and tank shells against all the cars and people trying to move”, added Moaz Mohammed, 34.
“The fighting and the ground advance of the Israeli army in the Khan Younes area do not allow civilians to move” on the Salaheddine road, in the north and east of the city, the army confirmed .
Smoke meanwhile rose into the sky after bombings on northern Gaza and above Rafah in the south, according to images shot by AFP.
At the same time, several sources of tension in the Middle East are worrying the international community, after incidents on Sunday in the Red Sea and in Iraq, while violence is increasing in the occupied West Bank and on the border between Israel and Lebanon.
Nearly 16,000 dead
The Hamas Health Ministry said Monday that 15,899 people, 70 percent of them women and children, have been killed since Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip began on October 7.
In Israel, the attack carried out by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza left 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. In retaliation, Israel declared war on Hamas and promised to destroy the Islamist movement, in power since 2007 in the Gaza Strip.
The army announced Monday that three soldiers were killed on Sunday in northern Gaza, bringing the total to 75 soldiers dead since the start of the ground offensive.
In addition, according to the army, 137 hostages kidnapped in Israel on October 7 are still in the hands of Hamas or affiliated groups, after the release during the truce of 105 hostages, including 80 released in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
On Monday, fighting raged in the northern city of Gaza, targeted by numerous airstrikes.
According to witnesses, Israeli tanks opened fire and entered the Old City market for the first time, where they destroyed dozens of stalls.
The previous night, a strike on an entrance to Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza left several people dead, according to the Palestinian Wafa agency. The army has not confirmed this information.
Israel accuses Hamas, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, of having installed infrastructure in or under hospitals in the Gaza Strip and of using civilians as human shields.
Chaos in hospitals
In the south, since Friday, strikes have massively targeted Khan Younès and its surroundings, where every day now the army warns in leaflets dropped on certain neighborhoods that a “terrible attack is imminent”, and orders residents to leave. .
Since the start of the war, hundreds of thousands of displaced people have massed in the south, hoping to flee the fighting or responding to the orders of the Israeli army which now controls several sectors in the north of the Gaza Strip.
They survive today under bombings in the south, crowded into makeshift shelters, schools, tents, sleeping outside or in their cars.
While most hospitals in the north are out of service, those in the south are plunged into chaos, overwhelmed by the massive arrival of wounded, without electricity, their fuel reserves to run the generators almost dry.
“Enough with the war”
In a devastated area of the neighboring town of Rafah, survivors were searching through the rubble on Monday.
“We were at home and we heard a huge noise and things started falling on us, it was like an earthquake. We had never seen this before, the earth shook and the sound was so loud,” said one survivor, Abu Jahar al-Hajj.
In Deir al-Balah, further north, injured people lie on the floor of al-Aqsa hospital waiting to be treated.
“My four-year-old daughter is under the rubble, I don’t know if she is dead or alive. Stop the war, enough with the war,” cries a woman, Walaa Abu Libda.
The army announced on Sunday that it had carried out “around 10,000 airstrikes” on Gaza since the start of the war.
These strikes destroyed or damaged more than half of the homes, according to the UN.
The needs are immense in the territory subjected to a total siege by Israel since October 9, where 1.8 million people, out of 2.4 million inhabitants, have been displaced by the war according to the UN.
With the exception of the seven days of truce which allowed the entry from Egypt of hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks, the Rafah border post only opens very partially to let a few trucks pass or allow the evacuation of foreigners, in very limited numbers.
Early Monday, the Israeli army also launched operations in different sectors of the occupied West Bank, notably in Jenin, where around thirty military vehicles were deployed, according to the Palestinian Wafa agency.
Two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid in Qalqiliya, in the northern West Bank, according to the Palestinian Authority.