Dozens of Israeli tanks, troop transports and bulldozers entered the south of the Gaza Strip, near the town of Khan Younes, witnesses told AFP on Monday.
“The Israeli army continues to expand its ground operation against Hamas throughout the Gaza Strip. The army operates wherever Hamas has strongholds,” declared late Sunday evening its spokesperson, Daniel Hagari.
Israeli soldiers have been engaged in a ground offensive since October 27 in northern Gaza, where they have taken control of several sectors. Since the resumption of fighting on Friday at the expiration of a truce After a week with Hamas, the army focused mainly on air raids.
During the night from Sunday to Monday, a strike on an entrance to the Kamal Adwan hospital, located in the north of Gaza, left several dead according to the Palestinian Wafa agency, with the Hamas government accusing the Israeli army in a statement. ofa “serious violation” of international humanitarian law.
Contacted by AFP to find out if it had bombed the perimeter of this hospital, the Israeli army did not respond immediately. Israel accuses Hamas of installing infrastructure in or under hospitals and using civilians as human shields.
The Hamas Ministry of Health said on Sunday that 15,523 people, 70% of them women and children, were killed since the start of Israeli bombings on the Gaza Strip, carried out in response to the bloody October 7 attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel.
“In the past hours, only 316 dead and 664 injured have been pulled out of the rubble and taken to hospitals, but many others are still under the rubble”specified the spokesperson for the Hamas Ministry of Health Ashraf al-Qidreh, a toll which has increased since the end of the truce.
In Israel, the attack launched by Hamas commandos on October 7 caused 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. In response, Israel declared war on Hamas and promised to destroy the Islamist movement, in power since 2007 in Gaza.
The army reported on Monday five soldiers killed, including three on Sunday, since fighting resumed on Friday.
“10,000 airstrikes”
Since the start of the war, the Israeli army has carried out “around 10,000 airstrikes”, she said on Sunday. That is more than the Russian strikes in Ukraine since the start of the invasion of the country.
In the south of the Gaza Strip, strikes have massively targeted the large city of Khan Younes and its surroundings, where every day now the army warns in leaflets dropped on certain neighborhoods that a “terrible attack is imminent”, and orders the inhabitants to leave.
On Sunday, residents fled the city, on foot, piled into carts or by car, their belongings piled on the roof.
Hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip are overwhelmed by the influx of wounded while the fuel reserves to run the generators are almost dry.
At the Nasser hospital in Khan Younes, the largest in southern Gaza, new wounded and new bodies, sometimes with no one to identify them, flock to each explosion.
“Words fail me to describe the horrors that strike the children here”, James Elder, a Unicef spokesperson present at Nasser hospital, said in a video on Sunday. “I see children arriving en masse among the victims.”he declared earlier on X.
In the nearby town of Rafah, residents stomping through rubble gathered around a huge crater. “It’s an extraordinary bombardment. We don’t know why. We don’t know for what purpose”exclaimed one of them, Mohammad Fahjan.
Early Monday, the Israeli army also launched operations in different sectors of the occupied West Banknotably in Jenin, where around thirty military vehicles are deployed, according to the Palestinian agency Wafa.
Tensions in Iraq and Yemen
Without calling into question the rights of their ally”to defend oneself” facing Hamas, the United States warned Israel against an increase in civilian victims.
“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”insisted Vice-President Kamala Harris this weekend, alarmed by images “devastating” of Gaza and calling on Israel to “do more to protect innocent civilians.”
ADVERTISEMENTThe Israel/Hamas war also has consequences for the United States, which has noted a increase in attacks against their soldiersbases or allies in the Middle East except during the one-week truce, from November 24 to November 1.
An American destroyer shot down three drones while providing assistance on Sunday to commercial ships in the Red Sea targeted by attacks from Yemen, Washington said, denouncing “a direct threat” for maritime safety.
Earlier, the Houthi rebels announced that they had carried out a “operation” against “Israeli ships in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait” – a strategic waterway linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden – in retaliation for Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip.
On Sunday, the United States also said it had conducted a “self-defense strike against imminent threat” in northern Iraq. Five fighters from a pro-Iran armed group, a country supporting Hamas, were killed Sunday evening in the province of Kirkuk (north) by a bombing, according to a security source.
