Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled the southern Gaza Strip after an evacuation order from Israel, raising fears of a major new offensive in this part of the Palestinian territory, which was subjected to new Israeli bombardments on Wednesday.
On Israel’s northern front, Lebanon’s Hezbollah claimed to have fired “100 rockets” at two Israeli military positions in response to the death of one of its commanders in an Israeli raid in southern Lebanon, amid fears of a full-scale war between the two sides.
In the ninth month of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed on Tuesday that it would not end until its objectives had been “achieved”: “the destruction of Hamas and the release of all the hostages” kidnapped on October 7 during an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel.
It is “a long campaign,” acknowledged the chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi, referring to the devastating offensive launched by Israel in the small, overpopulated Palestinian territory in response to the attack by Hamas, which has been in power in Gaza since 2007.
In the southern Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of people have fled areas of eastern Rafah and Khan Younis since Monday, forced to return in search of water, food and shelter. In temperatures of around 30 degrees Celsius, the displaced fled on foot, in vehicles or crammed onto overloaded trailers amid the dusty ruins of Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza from which the army withdrew in early April after a months-long battle.
Around 250,000 people are targeted by the evacuation order issued by the army on Monday after rocket fire towards Israel.
The appeal, which covers an area of 117 square kilometres, or a third of Palestinian territory, is “the largest since October, when residents of northern Gaza were ordered to evacuate” in the early days of the war, the UN said.
“Without shelter, without food, without water”
Abdallah Mouhareb, a 25-year-old resident of Khan Younis, said he was displaced several times. When the army withdrew, he returned home with his family, before leaving again without knowing where to go. “We slept in the street without shelter, without food, without water. There was shelling around us,” he said, while the UN says there is no safe place in the Palestinian territory under siege by Israel.
Israel has not indicated whether there will be a new major operation in the south, but its evacuation orders are usually a preamble to offensives.
After advancing from the north, calling for evacuations of the areas it was targeting, the army launched a ground operation on May 7 in the city of Rafah, then presented as the last major Hamas stronghold in Gaza. But in recent weeks, fighting against Hamas has resumed in several areas that the army had said it controlled.
On June 27, it launched a ground operation in Shujaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City. Fighting and shelling in the area have displaced 60,000 to 80,000 people, according to the UN.
The army said it was continuing its operations “against terrorist sites” in Shujaiya, as well as in Rafah and central Gaza.
According to an AFP correspondent, airstrikes and artillery fire targeted several areas of Gaza City, including Shujaiya, where a Hamas source reported fighting.
Witnesses reported artillery fire on the Nusseirat refugee camp in the centre of the enclave and on Rafah.
“An abyss of suffering”
On October 7, Hamas commandos infiltrated into southern Israel from Gaza and carried out an attack that killed 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people kidnapped during the attack, 116 are still being held in Gaza, of whom 42 are dead, according to the army.
In response, Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the United States, Canada, the European Union and Israel. The Israeli offensive in Gaza has so far killed 37,953 people, mostly civilians, including at least 28 in the past 24 hours, according to data from the Health Ministry of the Hamas-run Gaza government.
The war has caused a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, where water and food are in short supply, aid is in short supply and 1.9 million people, or 80 percent of the population, are now displaced, according to the UN. “Palestinian civilians in Gaza are in a pit of suffering. Their lives are shattered,” the UN humanitarian coordinator for the territory, Sigrid Kaag, said on Tuesday.
On the Israeli-Lebanese border, violence between Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, and the Israeli army has intensified. The Israeli army confirmed that it had killed a Hezbollah military leader. In response, Hezbollah said it had launched “100 rockets” at Israeli positions in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan, as well as projectiles at a base in northern Israel.