The Israeli army bombed the Rafah sector on Saturday, at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, with Benjamin Netanyahu having ordered the military to prepare an “evacuation plan” for hundreds of thousands of civilians there before a possible ground offensive.
Early Saturday, witnesses reported strikes in the vicinity of this city now populated by around 1.3 million Palestinians, more than half the population of the Gaza Strip, the vast majority being people who were there. are refugees to escape the violence further north.
After Gaza City, then Khan Younes, Israel is now targeting a ground operation in this city adjoining Egypt, in the far south of the Gaza Strip, as part of its military offensive against the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
After ordering the army on Wednesday to prepare an offensive on Rafah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked it on Friday to submit a “combined plan” for the “evacuation” of civilians from Rafah and the “destruction” of Hamas in this city.
“It is impossible to achieve the objective of the war without eliminating Hamas and leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah,” and that requires “civilians to evacuate the combat zones,” he said.
PHOTO MAHMUD HAMS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
A child makes his way through the rubble of a building hit by Israeli bombing in Rafah on February 9.
“If they (the Israeli army) invade Rafah, as Netanyahu said, there will be massacres and we will be able to say goodbye to all humanity,” said Adel al-Hajj, a displaced person in the city.
“Catastrophic”
In Rafah, during the day on Friday, several buildings were destroyed, according to AFP photographers. In one neighborhood, people are seen carrying the bodies of three children killed in a bombing.
“Forcing more than a million Palestinians displaced in Rafah to evacuate again without finding a safe place to go would be illegal and have catastrophic consequences,” Nadia Hardman, migrant and refugee rights specialist for Human Rights Watch, said overnight. Rights Watch.
“There is no safe place in Gaza. The international community must take measures to prevent further atrocities,” she added, while the UN and even the United States, Israel’s main ally, have expressed fears for civilians there.
PHOTO SIMON MALFATTO, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Map of the Gaza Strip with the number of internally displaced people in collective centers, by governorate, according to Shelter Cluster data as of January 22.
“Carrying out such an operation now (in Rafah) without planning and without thought in an area housing a million people would be a disaster,” the US State Department warned this week.
In a rare criticism of Israel since the start four months ago of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, US President Joe Biden deemed the “response in the Gaza Strip” “excessive” to the attack of October 7.
The war was sparked by an unprecedented attack carried out that day by Hamas commandos infiltrated from the Gaza Strip in southern Israel, which left more than 1,160 dead, mostly civilians, according to a count of AFP based on official Israeli data.
In retaliation, Israel vowed to “destroy” Hamas and launched a vast offensive which left at least 27,940 dead in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, according to the Ministry of Health of the Islamist movement, which took power in 2007 in the Palestinian territory.
Talks, strikes and finances
During the October 7 attack, around 250 people were also kidnapped and taken to Gaza. A one-week truce last November allowed the release of more than a hundred hostages in exchange for those of some 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
New negotiations between Qatari and Egyptian mediators and Hamas, launched Thursday in Cairo to try to reach a truce agreement including an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and hostages, ended Friday, an official told AFP of Hamas. “The Hamas delegation has left Cairo,” said this official, saying, without further details, “waiting for a response from Israel.”
On another military front, the pro-Iranian Lebanese movement Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, claimed to have launched dozens of rockets on Friday at an Israeli military position in the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel. And the Israeli army reported airstrikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon, bordering northern Israel.
During the night, Israel targeted the surroundings of the Syrian capital Damascus, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) and the official Syrian press agency which reported “material” damage.
On the markets, Israel saw the rating agency Moody’s lower its debt rating by one notch, from A1 to A2, due to the repercussions “of the ongoing conflict with Hamas” which “increase” the political risk for the country and “weaken” its institutions as well as its “fiscal solidity”.
For the financial agency Bloomberg, this is the very first time that Israel has experienced a downgrade in its long-term rating.