from Jabaliya to Khan Younes, Israel’s war against Hamas enters its most intense phase

The Jewish state’s offensive is focused on the south of the Palestinian enclave, where two leaders of the Islamist group come from.

The town of Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, became the epicenter of the fighting, as Israel’s war against Hamas entered its most intense phase on Wednesday, December 6. The entire territory of the Gaza Strip is now concerned: the north, with the Jabaliya refugee camp and the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, and the south, with Khan Younes, the second city of the Palestinian enclave.

Khan Younes had 200,000 inhabitants before the war. There are now 600,000 of them, with the thousands of displaced people that Israel fled a few weeks ago from the north of the Gaza Strip. The battle of Khan Younes was a street battle, hand-to-hand, house by house, in the middle of ruins and terrorized civilians. The shelters are overrun. There is no medicine, very little water and very little food. Telephone and internet networks are regularly cut. Hospitals are completely overwhelmed and there are no places to evacuate the most affected patients.

Israel determined areas that were supposed to be spared and communicated them to the population through leaflets sent from the sky and maps posted on the internet. But according to several testimonies on site, the information does not get through and the bombings are incessant.

Hamas truly weakened?

The current operation is still part of the mission that the Israeli government has given itself to destroy the Islamist movement. Two names of members of the Islamist movement were communicated on Wednesday by the Israeli army, which claims to have eliminated them. They are Ahmed Al-Ghandoor, who led one of the 24 Hamas brigades in northern Gaza, and Wael Rajab, his deputy. Two well-known names for Michael Kobi: a former member of Israeli domestic intelligence, he interrogated the most important leaders of Hamas for years, including Yahya Sinwar. “We killed many high-level leaders, more than 25 or 30, in Khan Younes, in Rafah, in Jabaliya. But there are still some. And we are going to destroy Hamashe assures. The ideology of Hamas will undoubtedly remain, we cannot fight against that. Maybe Ismaïl Haniyeh [le chef du bureau politique, exilé au Qatar] will remain hidden in Qatar and they will not kill him there. But as soon as we have the opportunity to kill him outside, we will.”he assures.

“There will be no more Hamas in Gaza.”

Michael Kobi, former member of Israeli domestic intelligence

at franceinfo

The main objective of the Israeli army is to annihilate Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists. First its heads, Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Islamist movement in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, the “brains” of military strategy, and Marwan Issa, “shadow man” and deputy head of the military branch of Hamas. But also all the leaders of the intermediate, military and political levels. In Gaza, Hamas is made up of two brigades, one in the north and the other in the south, divided into 24 battalions of around a thousand men. The Israeli army estimates having killed 6,000, or 25% of this contingent. Then there is the political branch, and then Hamas from abroad, in Lebanon and Qatar, Hamas from the West Bank and that of Israeli prisons. The war in Gaza will end at some point, but the war against Hamas could last for years.