Israel Says It Is Poised to Move on Rafah

A woman and a girl search for items through the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 24, 2024 following reported Israeli air strikes overnight. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)
A woman and a girl search for items through the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 24, 2024 following reported Israeli air strikes overnight. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)
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Israel Says It Is Poised to Move on Rafah

A woman and a girl search for items through the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 24, 2024 following reported Israeli air strikes overnight. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)
A woman and a girl search for items through the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 24, 2024 following reported Israeli air strikes overnight. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)

Israel's military is poised to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and assault Hamas hold-outs in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defense official said on Wednesday, despite international warnings of humanitarian catastrophe.

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government said Israel was "moving ahead" with a ground operation, but gave no timeline.

The defense official said Israel's Defense Ministry had bought 40,000 tents, each with the capacity for 10 to 12 people, to house Palestinians relocated from Rafah in advance of an assault.

Video circulating online appeared to show rows of square white tents going up in Khan Younis, a city some 5 km (3 miles) from Rafah. Reuters could not verify the video but reviewed images from satellite company Maxar Technologies which showed tent camps on Khan Younis land that had been vacant weeks ago.

An Israeli government source said Netanyahu's war cabinet planned to meet in the coming two weeks to authorize civilian evacuations, expected to take around a month.

The defense official, who requested anonymity, told Reuters that the military could go into action immediately but was awaiting a green light from Netanyahu.

Rafah, which abuts the Egyptian border, is sheltering more than a million Palestinians who fled the half-year-old Israeli offensive through the rest of Gaza, and say the prospect of fleeing yet again is terrifying.

"I have to make a decision whether to leave Rafah because my mother and I are afraid an invasion could happen suddenly and we won't get time to escape," said Aya, 30, who has been living temporarily in the city with her family in a school.

She said that some families recently moved to a refugee camp in coastal Al-Mawasi, but their tents caught fire when tank shells landed nearby. "Where do we go?"

HITTING HARD

Israel, which launched its war to annihilate Hamas after the group's Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli towns, says Rafah is home to four Hamas combat battalions reinforced by thousands of retreating fighters, and it must defeat them to achieve victory.

"Hamas was hit hard in the northern sector. It was also hit hard in the center of the Strip. And soon it will be hit hard in Rafah, too," Brigadier-General Itzik Cohen, commander of Israel's 162nd Division operating in Gaza, told Kan public TV.

But Israel's closest ally Washington has called on it to set aside plans for an assault, and says Israel can combat Hamas fighters there by other means.

"We could not support a Rafah ground operation without an appropriate, credible, executable humanitarian plan precisely because of the complications for delivery of assistance," David Satterfield, US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issued, told reporters on Tuesday.

"We continue discussions with Israel on what we believe are alternate ways of addressing a challenge which we recognize, which is Hamas military present in Rafah."

Egypt says it will not allow Gazans to be pushed across the border onto its territory. Cairo had warned Israel against moving on Rafah, which "would lead to massive human massacres, losses (and) widespread destruction", its State Information Service said.

Israel has withdrawn most of its ground troops from southern Gaza this month but kept up air strikes and conducted raids into areas its troops abandoned. Efforts by the United States, Egypt and Qatar to broker an extended ceasefire in time to head off an assault on Rafah have so far failed.

Gaza medical officials say than 34,000 people have been killed in Israel's military campaign, with thousands more bodies feared buried under rubble.

Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted 253 on Oct 7, according to Israeli tallies. Of those hostages, 129 remain in Gaza, Israeli officials say. More than 260 Israeli troops have been killed in ground fighting since Oct 20, the military says.

H. A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow in international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said he expected the assault on Rafah "sooner rather than later" because Netanyahu is under pressure to meet his stated objectives of rescuing hostages and killing all the Hamas leaders.

"The invasion of Rafah is unavoidable because of the way he has framed all of this," he said. But it will not be possible for everyone to leave the city, so "if he sends the military into Rafah, there are going to be a lot of casualties". 



Hamas Says Israeli Airstrike Kills Two of its Members in West Bank

A woman walks with children next to an ambulance as Israeli military vehicles pass by during a raid, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank December 14, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta/File Photo
A woman walks with children next to an ambulance as Israeli military vehicles pass by during a raid, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank December 14, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta/File Photo
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Hamas Says Israeli Airstrike Kills Two of its Members in West Bank

A woman walks with children next to an ambulance as Israeli military vehicles pass by during a raid, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank December 14, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta/File Photo
A woman walks with children next to an ambulance as Israeli military vehicles pass by during a raid, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank December 14, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta/File Photo

An Israeli airstrike killed two of its members in the city of Tulkarm on Monday, Hamas said, underscoring Israel's renewed focus on armed groups in the occupied West Bank since the start of the ceasefire in Gaza.

Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, said the two killed on Monday were members of its armed wing. Witnesses in the city said a raid was underway but there was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. The Palestinian health ministry confirmed that two people had been killed, without identifying them, Reuters reported.

In Jenin, further north, a major operation with hundreds of Israeli troops backed by armoured vehicles, drones and helicopters, looked set to go into a second week, with smoke rising above the refugee camp adjacent to the city, a longtime centre of armed militant groups.

Armoured bulldozers and diggers have destroyed buildings and roads in the camp, a crowded township built for descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the 1948 war around the creation of the state of Israel, and thousands of people have left their homes.

At least 16 Palestinians have been killed in Jenin and surrounding areas since the start of the operation a week ago, including four claimed as fighters by Hamas and the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad.

Late on Saturday, Israeli forces also shot a two-year old girl during a raid on the village of Ash-Shuhada, just to the south of Jenin, Palestinian officials said.

"They started to shoot at us through the windows without any warning," said Ghada Asous, grandmother of two year-old Laila Muhammad Al-Khatib. "All of a sudden, the special forces raided us and were shooting through the windows."

The Israeli military said troops on a counterterrorism operation had fired at a structure where suspected militants had barricaded themselves.

"The army is aware of the claim that uninvolved civilians were injured as a result of the fire. The incident is under review," it said in a statement.