Israeli soldiers in tanks stormed and shelled several neighborhoods in Gaza City on Monday, forcing thousands of Palestinians to flee again in the tenth month of a devastating war.
Triggered by an unprecedented attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, the war has not abated despite the redoubled efforts of mediators and a gesture by the Palestinian Islamist movement to relaunch negotiations on a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
In recent months, hopes for a truce deal have been repeatedly dashed by differences between the parties, despite international pressure to end a war that has caused a humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip, which is threatened by famine, according to the UN.
This war risks provoking a new conflict in Lebanon, Israel’s neighbor, after an intensification of gunfire between the Israeli army and the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah, which opened this front on October 8 in support of its ally Hamas.
In the north of the Palestinian territory, Israeli soldiers stormed several neighborhoods of Gaza City, and thousands of residents fled, according to witnesses and the Civil Defense on Monday.
The latter said it had received reports of “dozens of martyrs and wounded” in some neighborhoods, but said it could not reach them due to the intensity of the shooting. “Dozens of families are surrounded by Israeli troops,” it said.
Tanks have taken up positions in several neighborhoods and others continue to advance, aided by airstrikes and drones, witnesses added.
Evacuation order
The army called on residents over loudspeakers to evacuate the Al-Daraj and Al-Tuffah neighborhoods in Gaza City. Some 2.4 million people are under siege by Israel in the Gaza Strip, where water and food are in short supply and more than 80 percent of the population is displaced, according to the UN.
In the Choujaïya district, “dozens of terrorists were eliminated,” according to the army.
In the south, the army said it had “eliminated more than 30 terrorists” in Rafah and struck rocket launching sites in Khan Younis.
On October 7, Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza into southern Israel launched an attack that killed 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data. Of the 251 people kidnapped at the time, 116 are still being held in Gaza, 42 of whom are dead, according to the Israeli army.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007 and which it, along with the United States and the European Union, classifies as a terrorist organization.
His army launched a major air and then ground offensive that devastated the Palestinian territory and left 38,153 dead, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry of the Hamas-led Gaza government.
In the midst of a ground offensive launched on May 7 in Rafah to eliminate, according to Israel, “the last battalions of Hamas”, the army faced a resurgence of the Islamist movement in the north of the Palestinian territory, raising the specter of a long confrontation.
However, she had announced at the beginning of January that she had “completed the dismantling of the military structure” of Hamas in the north.
“It blocks everything”
Caution remains the order of the day on truce efforts.
On Sunday, a senior Hamas official speaking on condition of anonymity said “the ball is in the Israelis’ court,” after saying his movement no longer demanded a permanent ceasefire before launching negotiations on a truce and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
This “point was overcome,” and in exchange, the mediators – the United States, Qatar, Egypt – “committed that a ceasefire would remain in effect as long as negotiations are ongoing,” he said.
Hamas, he added, had informed the mediators that it wanted to see three steps towards a ceasefire, including the entry into Gaza of 400 aid trucks per day and an Israeli withdrawal from the “Philadelphia corridor and the Rafah crossing” between southern Gaza and Egypt.
Hamas had previously demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent ceasefire.
But Benjamin Netanyahu’s office responded to Hamas’s offer by saying that “any agreement would allow Israel to fight until all the objectives of the war are achieved,” namely the destruction of Hamas and the release of all the hostages.
He had previously said that Israeli envoys would return to Doha in the coming days for talks.
“Netanyahu’s intentions have become clear. Every time there is a breakthrough towards an agreement, he blocks everything and intensifies the aggression against our people,” a Hamas official said on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
To increase pressure for an agreement, new demonstrations are planned in Israel on Monday.