Israeli air strikes killed at least 28 Palestinians in Rafah early Saturday, hours after the Israeli prime minister said he had asked the army to plan the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from the southern Gaza city before escalating the ground invasion.
Benjamin Netanyahu did not provide details or a timeline, but the announcement sparked widespread panic.
More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are crammed into Rafah, many having been repeatedly displaced under Israeli evacuation orders that now cover two-thirds of Gaza’s territory, and it is not clear where they can flee next.
News of the invasion plans came on the heels of a week of increasing public friction between Netanyahu and the administration of US President Joe Biden. US officials said that an invasion of Rafah without a plan for the civilian population would lead to disaster.
Israel carries out air strikes in Rafah on an almost daily basis, even after telling civilians in recent weeks to seek shelter there to escape ground fighting in the city of Khan Yunis, just to the north.
Overnight and into Saturday morning, three airstrikes on homes in the Rafah area killed 28 people, according to a health official and Associated Press journalists who saw bodies arriving at hospitals.
Each raid killed several members of three families, including 10 children, the youngest of whom was 3 months old.
In Khan Yunis, the current center of ground fighting, Israeli forces opened fire on Nasser Hospital, the largest hospital in the area, killing at least one person and wounding several others, said Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health.
He said that medical teams were no longer able to move between the facility’s buildings due to the intensity of the fire. He said that 300 medical workers, 450 patients and 10,000 displaced people were taking shelter in the hospital.
A rift with Washington
The steadily rising Palestinian death toll — which now stands at about 28,000 after four months of war, according to Gaza health officials — has contributed to friction between Netanyahu and Washington.
Israel holds Hamas responsible for the killing of civilians because it is fighting from within civilian areas, but American officials rejected this, demanding more precise strikes. President Joe Biden said this week that Israel’s response was “exaggerated.”
Israel says Rafah, which borders Egypt, is Hamas’s last remaining stronghold in Gaza after more than four months of war.
Netanyahu’s office said Friday: “It is impossible to achieve the war goal of eliminating Hamas by keeping four Hamas battalions in Rafah. On the contrary, it is clear that the intense activity in Rafah requires the evacuation of civilians from the combat areas.”
He said he ordered military and security officials to come up with a “joint plan” that would include a mass evacuation of civilians and the destruction of Hamas forces in the town.
It remains unclear where civilians might go. The Israeli attack has caused widespread destruction, especially in northern Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of people have no homes to return to.
In addition, Egypt warned that any movement of Palestinians across the border into Egypt would threaten the four-decade-old peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. The border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which is mostly closed, serves as the main entry point for humanitarian aid.
Rafah’s pre-war population was about 280,000, and according to the United Nations, it is now home to an additional 1.4 million people who live with relatives in sprawling shelters or camps after fleeing fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
Israel declared war after several thousand Hamas fighters rushed across the border into southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage.
The Israeli air and ground offensive has killed nearly 28,000 Palestinians, most of them women and minors, according to local health officials. Nearly 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced, and the region has been plunged into a humanitarian crisis with food and medical services in short supply.
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2024-02-10 09:53:24