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 announced its intention to extend its ground operations against Hamas “across the entire Gaza Strip”, almost two months after the start of the war triggered by the bloody attack of the 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.
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.
On Monday, dozens of Israeli tanks, troop transports and bulldozers entered southern Gaza, near the large town of Khan Younes, close to 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, added Moaz Mohammed, 34.
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.
Chaos in hospitals
The Hamas Health Ministry said Sunday that 15,523 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.
During the night from Sunday to Monday, 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.
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.
“Words fail me to describe the horrors that are hitting the children here,” James Elder, a UNICEF spokesperson at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, the largest in southern Gaza, said in a video on Sunday. , which sees many children arriving among the victims.
“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.
Further north, in Deir al-Balah, 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.
“Direct threat”
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.
On Sunday, an American destroyer foiled a drone attack launched from Yemen against commercial ships in the Red Sea, announced Washington, which denounced “a direct threat” to maritime security.
The Houthi rebels, supported by Iran, announced that they had carried out an “operation” against “Israeli ships in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait”, a strategic waterway linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, in retaliation for Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip.
In Iraq, five fighters from a pro-Iran armed group, a country supporting Hamas, were killed on Sunday in the province of Kirkuk (north) by a bombing, according to a senior security official. The United States confirmed a “self-defense strike against an imminent threat.”