The Israeli army tightened its grip on the south of the Gaza Strip, where dozens of tanks entered on Monday as part of its offensive against Palestinian Hamas, making the situation even more perilous for a population trapped by bombings.
Engaged since October 27 in a ground campaign in the north of the besieged Palestinian territory, the Israeli army has expanded its ground operations to the entire Gaza Strip, almost two months after the start of the war launched on October 7 by a bloody attack by the Islamist movement in Israel.
Since the resumption of fighting on December 1 at the end of a seven-day truce, the Israeli army has been shelling the south of the small overpopulated territory of 2.4 million inhabitants, causing many deaths and injuries among the inhabitants. and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who came to take refuge there, confined within an increasingly reduced perimeter.
Adding to the chaos, Palestinian telecommunications company Paltel claimed Monday evening that “all telecommunications services in the Gaza Strip were shut downciting “a cut in the main fiber networks on the Israeli side”.
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric, who arrived in Gaza on Monday, denounced the “intolerable” suffering of the populationcalling for the “protection of civilians” in the face of the “moral failure” of the international community.
Monday evening, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told X that the Israeli army asked the WHO to empty its warehouse in southern Gaza “within 24 hours”“because ground operations will render it unusable.”
“With force”
Earlier, the director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, Thomas White, deplored that “even in Rafah, where people are forced to flee, the sound of airstrikes punctuates the daytime”.
“People ask us for advice on where to stay safe. We don’t know what to say to them“, he wrote on X.
On Monday, the Israeli army said it was acting “forcefully” in Khan Younes, a large city in the south of the Gaza Strip already massively targeted by strikes since the resumption of fighting on Friday, and where every day now it warns in dropped leaflets on certain neighborhoods that “a terrible attack is imminent”, ordering residents to leave.
Dozens of Israeli tanks, troop transports and bulldozers entered the south of the Palestinian territory near Khan Younes, where some of the civilians ordered by Israel to flee northern Gaza during the first phase of the conflict are crowded. offensive, witnesses told AFP.
Amine Abou Hola, 59, said that these vehicles had entered “to a depth of two kilometers” in the village of al-Qarara, north of Khan Younes.
Smoke rose into the sky above Rafah, a town in the south bordering Egypt and neighboring Khan Younes, according to images shot by AFP.
The Hamas Ministry of Health claimed Monday that 15,899 people, 70% women and children and adolescents, have been killed since the start of Israeli bombings on the Gaza Strip on October 7.
In Israel, the attack carried out by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza left 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. In retaliation, Israel declared war on Hamas and promised to destroy the ruling Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip.