The Israeli military signalled that it has wrapped up major combat in northern Gaza, saying it has completed dismantling Hamas’s military infrastructure there as the war against the militant group entered its fourth month Sunday.
Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said late Saturday that forces would “continue to deepen the achievement” there, and strengthen defences along the Israel-Gaza border fence.
The announcement came ahead of a visit to Israel by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden administration officials, including Blinken, have repeatedly urged Israel to wind down its blistering air and ground offensive in Gaza and shift to more targeted attacks against Hamas leaders to prevent harm to Palestinian civilians.
In recent weeks, Israel had already been scaling back its military assault in northern Gaza and pressing its offensive in the territory’s south, where most of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller areas in a humanitarian disaster while being pounded by Israeli airstrikes.
The war was triggered by a Hamas attack on southern Israel Oct. 7 when militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took hundreds of people hostage — some of whom have since been released.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted the war will not end until the objectives of eliminating Hamas, getting Israel’s hostages returned and ensuring that Gaza won’t be a threat to Israel are met.
The leader of Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia vowed vengeance for the killing of senior Hamas leader Saleh Arouri in Beirut. Protests rage throughout the Middle East as fears increase that the Israel-Hamas war will escalate to multiple fronts.
Israel’s retaliation by air, land and sea has killed more than 22,800 Palestinians and wounded more than 58,000, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. Health officials say about two-thirds of those killed have been women and minors.
On Sunday, officials at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis received the bodies of 18 people, including 12 children, who were killed in an Israeli strike late Saturday. More than 50 people were injured in the strike on a home in the Khan Younis refugee camp, which was set up decades ago to house refugees from the 1948 Mideast war over Israel’s creation and morphed into a neighbourhood of the city.
Israeli forces killed six Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian health officials said on Sunday. Israeli officials say a police officer was also killed.
Israel said its aircraft fired on Palestinian militants who had attacked troops in the city of Jenin. The Palestinian ministry said the strike targeted people who had gathered at the site. Eyewitnesses said the attack happened as Israeli forces were withdrawing. Four of those killed were brothers, according to family members.
Israeli forces were also pushing deeper into the central city of Deir al-Balah, where on Saturday residents in several neighbourhoods were warned in flyers dropped over the city that they must evacuate their homes.
The international medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by the acronym MSF, said it was evacuating its medical staff and their families from Deir al-Balah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital because of the growing danger.
The majority of residents in Gaza are being forced to survive with very few resources as fighting between Israel and Hamas continues, but hope remains for a better new year.
“The situation became so dangerous that some staff living in the neighbouring areas were not able to leave their houses because of the constant threats of drones and snipers,” said Carolina Lopez, the group’s emergency co-ordinator at the hospital.
She said a bullet penetrated a wall of the hospital’s intensive care unit on Friday, and that “drone attacks and sniper fire were just a few hundred metres from the hospital” over the past couple of days.
“On some days, we have received more dead than injured,” said Lopez. “No one and nowhere is safe in Gaza.”
Hagari, the military spokesperson, said the scattered fighting in northern Gaza was to be expected, along with rockets sporadically being launched from there toward Israel. He said Hamas no longer operates in an organized manner in the area, but that militants “without a framework and without commanders” are still present.
His comments about changing the way the forces are fighting appeared to be a nod to Blinken, who is on his fourth Mideast trip in three months.
In addition to appeals for scaling back high-intensity combat, Blinken has called for more aid to reach Gaza and urged Israel’s leaders to come up with a vision for post-war Gaza.
Two U.S. senators who inspected aid deliveries over the weekend described a cumbersome process that is slowing relief to the Palestinian population in the besieged territory — largely due to Israeli inspections of cargo trucks, with seemingly arbitrary rejections of vital humanitarian equipment. The system to ensure that aid deliveries within Gaza don’t get hit by Israeli forces is “totally broken,” said Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley, both Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration and Netanyahu remain far apart on who should run the territory after the war, with the Israeli leader repeatedly rejecting the Washington-floated idea of having a reformed Palestinian Authority to head an autonomous government in parts of the occupied West Bank that would eventually administer Gaza.
In a further complication of Blinken’s mission, a new escalation of cross-border fighting between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah has put strains on a U.S. push to prevent a regional conflagration. Saturday’s fighting was described by Hezbollah as an “initial response” to the targeted killing of a top Hamas leader in a Hezbollah stronghold of the Lebanese capital of Beirut last week. The strike was presumed to have been carried out by Israel.