Sunday’s evacuation orders focused on areas in and around Gaza’s second-largest city of Khan Younis, the Associated Press reported.
Palestinians in Gaza said they were running out of places to go, according to media reports. The Gaza Strip, bordering Israel and Egypt, is sealed. Many of the territory’s 2.3 million people are crammed in the south after Israel ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the war almost two months ago.
Before the latest evacuation orders, United Nations monitors said the areas told to evacuate made up about one-quarter of the territory.
The Israeli military renewed offensive on Friday after a truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed, and intensified its attacks over the weekend. Israel pounded targets in the south of Gaza, driving up the death toll as the United States and others urged more be done to protect civilians.
The prospect of further pauses in the fighting in Gaza appeared bleak, as Israel recalled its negotiators and Hamas’ deputy leader said any further swap of Gaza-held hostages for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel would only happen as part of ending the war.
“We will continue the war until we achieve all its goals, and it’s impossible to achieve those goals without the ground operation,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address Saturday night.
Top American officials have been publicly warning Israel about the consequences of the rising civilian death toll in Gaza. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Saturday cautioned that Israel risks “strategic defeat” in Gaza if it doesn’t do more to protect civilians.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Sunday that Israel shares the concerns. “The reduction of civilian casualties and, quite frankly, minimizing damage to civilian infrastructure is important to them,” Kirby said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The Israel Defense Forces IDF said on Saturday that Israeli strikes hit a total of over 400 terrorist targets in Gaza, including more than 50 targets in the area of Khan Yunis and an Islamic Jihad operational command center inside a mosque, as well as military targets used by Hamas Naval Force.
The BBC reported that hundreds of Gaza residents were seen leaving to the western part of Khan Yunis after the Israeli army dropped leaflets over the area warning people to leave.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday that Israel risked a decade of war if it pushed for the obliteration of Hamas. “We are at a moment when Israeli authorities must more precisely define their objectives and their final goal. The total destruction of Hamas — does anyone think it is possible? If this is the case, the war will last 10 years,” Macron told a press conference at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday skipped a speech he was scheduled to give at the COP28 meeting and accused Hamas of “blatantly” violating the truce.
Hamas launched a violent attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, killing at least 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Since then, Israel has been carrying out retaliatory strikes on the besieged enclave, killing more than 11,000 Palestinians, according to both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Source: politico.eu
Author: Pierre Emmanuel Ngendakumana
No comments:
Post a Comment