Israel’s defense minister has signaled that ground forces will advance on the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, which has become a haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes after nearly 13 weeks of war.
Rafah, which has also been a gateway for humanitarian aid, is a series of tents and makeshift shelters huddled on the border with Egypt. About half of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have crowded into and around the city, where about 200,000 people lived before the war, the United Nations said Friday.
The town is one of the last in southern Gaza not yet reached by Israeli ground forces, which are fighting house-to-house fighting in nearby Khan Younis.
“We are completing the mission in Khan Younis and we will also reach Rafah and eliminate every terrorist there who threatens to harm us,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said during a visit to troops in Khan Younis, according to footage. which was distributed by his office late Thursday.
The prospect of fighting in an area with so many displaced people has alarmed refugees there and United Nations officials.
“We are afraid of what will come next,” Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a news conference in Geneva on Friday. He described Rafa as a “pressure cooker of desperation”.
Mr Gallant’s comments came as Israel and Hamas consider a US-led proposal for a prolonged ceasefire and exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinians held by Israel.
It was unclear whether Mr. Gallant’s reference to Rafah reflected an immediate military target or was intended more as a message of resolve to the Israeli public and Hamas while Israel awaited the group’s response to the cease-fire proposal.
Hamas’s top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said in a statement on Friday that the group was studying the proposal but insisted the deal “completely ended” the fighting. The proposal does not include a permanent ceasefire.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue to fight Hamas in Gaza until it achieves “total victory”, even as it faces growing domestic pressure to strike a deal to free the remaining hostages and international calls to ease the fighting and limit the damage. to the civilian population.
For weeks, Israeli ground troops have been fighting heavily in Khan Younis, where Israel says it is trying to kill or capture Hamas leaders it believes are hiding in and under the city in an extensive network of tunnels.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israeli forces attacked a hospital complex in Khan Younis on Friday, killing several people, including one of its staff. The Israeli military declined to comment on the report. However, she said her information indicated that Hamas was operating in and around the hospital, Al-Amal, although she offered no evidence to support its claim.
The Al-Amal complex and a second hospital, the Nasser Medical Complex, have been surrounded for days by Israeli ground forces, according to aid groups and Gaza’s health ministry, trapping thousands of patients, medical staff and displaced Palestinians who had sought refuge.
Many Palestinians who fled the fighting in Khan Younis and elsewhere in Gaza in recent weeks have camped in Rafah, often with only the clothes they were wearing.
Ahmed Alghazaly, a 26-year-old Gaza resident, said by phone Friday that he feared the Israeli advance would push him out of Rafah, yet another displacement for his family, which hails from Gaza City.
From a rainy scene in Rafah, Mr Alghazali described feeling “besieged on all sides” by Israeli forces as the cold fell. Food was scarce and took hours to arrive, he said. But “wherever they tell us to go, we’ll go,” he said, with obvious exhaustion.
Israel’s stated goal of overthrowing Hamas’ rule in Gaza would likely require at least some of its forces to enter Rafah to attack the group’s network there. However, if Israel advances on the city, it is unclear how it would provide for the safety of civilians, many of whom have fled multiple times as Israel ordered evacuations in areas it intended to target.
Mr Laerke, the UN spokesman, said on Friday that severe restrictions on deliveries of supplies such as food, water and medicine, along with escalating disease levels, had increased the sense of desperation.
Mr Netanyahu said Israel must take control of a strip of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt to defeat Hamas, which led the October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and led to the kidnapping in Gaza 240 others.
The move could effectively cut Egypt off from Gaza, potentially weakening Egypt’s regional role and bringing the fighting to its borders. Gaza health officials say the death toll from Israel’s shelling and invasion of the enclave has exceeded 26,000 people.
Egyptian officials said Israeli military control of the land corridor would violate agreements between the two sides.
“It must be strongly emphasized that any Israeli move in this direction will lead to a serious threat to Egyptian-Israeli relations,” Diaa Rashwan, a spokeswoman for the Egyptian government, said in late January.
Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
