CAIRO (Reuters) -Israeli forces battled Hamas fighters in the narrow alleyways of Jabalia in northern Gaza on Friday in some of the fiercest engagements since they returned to the area a week ago, while in the south militants attacked tanks massing around Rafah.
Residents said Israeli armour had thrust as far as the market at the heart of Jabalia, the largest of Gaza’s eight historic refugee camps, and that bulldozers were demolishing homes and shops in the path of the advance.
“Tanks and planes are wiping out residential districts and markets, shops, restaurants, everything. It is all happening before the one-eyed world,” Ayman Rajab, a resident of western Jabalia, said via a chat app.
Israel had said its forces had cleared Jabalia months earlier in the Gaza war, triggered by the deadly Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, but said last week it was returning to prevent the Islamist group re-grouping there.
At the southern end of Gaza, thick smoke rose over Rafah, bordering Egypt, where an escalating Israeli assault has sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from what was one of the only places of refuge left.
“People are terrified and they’re trying to get away,” Jens Laerke, the UN humanitarian office spokesperson said in Geneva, adding that most were following orders to move north towards the coast but that there were no safe routes or destinations.
As the fighting raged, the U.S. military said trucks had started moving aid ashore from a temporary pier built off the coast, the first to reach the besieged enclave by sea in weeks.
The United Nations said it was finalising plans to distribute the aid, while reiterating that truck convoys by land – disrupted this month by the assault on Rafah – were the most efficient way of getting aid in.
“To stave off the horrors of famine, we must use the fastest and most obvious route to reach the people of Gaza – and for that, we need access by land now,” deputy U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said.
Jabalia resident Rajab, a father-of-four, said food aid was not the answer: “We want this war to end and then we can manage our lives on our own,” he said.
HUMANITARIAN FEARS
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said troops had killed more than 60 militants in recent days and located a weapons warehouse close to a shelter complex in what it described as a “divisional-level offensive” in Jabalia.
A divisional operation would typically involve multiple brigades of thousands of troops each, making it one of the biggest of the war.
“Even now, the soldiers are exchanging fire with terrorist cells in the area,” the IDF said. “The 7th Brigade’s fire control centre directed dozens of airstrikes, eliminated terrorists and destroyed terrorist infrastructure.”
At least 35,303 Palestinians have now been killed, according to figures from the enclave’s health ministry, while aid agencies have warned repeatedly of widespread hunger and the threat of disease.
Doctors say they have to perform surgery, including amputations, with no anaesthetics or painkillers as the medical system in the territory has virtually collapsed.
Israel says it must destroy Hamas for its own safety after the deaths of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, and to free the 128 hostages still held out of 253 abducted by the militants, according to its tallies.
To achieve that, it says it must capture Rafah, where around half of the territory’s 2.3 million people had sought shelter from fighting further north.
Israel said on Friday that its forces had rescued the bodies of three hostages from Gaza, without saying where they were found.
“Shani Louk, Amit Buskila and Yitzhak Gelernter were murdered by Hamas while escaping the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and their bodies were taken into Gaza,” chief military spokesperson Daniel Hagari told a briefing.
‘TRAGIC WAR’
Israeli tanks and warplanes bombarded parts of Rafah on Friday, while the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they were firing anti-tank missiles and mortars at forces massing to the east, southeast and inside the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
UNRWA, the main U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, said more than 630,000 people had fled Rafah since the offensive began on May 6. Many have crowded into Deir al-Balah, a city up the coast that is the only other one in Gaza yet to be assaulted by Israeli forces.
“They’re moving to areas where there is no water – we’ve got to truck it in – and people aren’t getting enough food,” Sam Rose, director of planning at UNRWA told Reuters on Friday by telephone from Rafah, where he said it was eerily quiet.
At the International Court of Justice, or World Court, in The Hague, where South Africa has accused Israel of violating the Genocide Convention, Israeli Justice Ministry official Gilad Noam defended the operation.
Noam said Israel was fighting a war of self-defence and that the military operation in Rafah was not aimed at civilians but at dismantling the last Hamas stronghold.
“There is a tragic war going on, but there is no genocide” in Gaza, Noam said.
The South African legal team, which set out its case for fresh emergency measures the previous day, framed the Israeli military operation as part of a genocidal plan aimed at bringing about the destruction of the Palestinian people.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Additional reporting by Clauda Tanios, James Mackenzie, Stephanie van den Berg, Henriette Chacar, Emma Farge and Anthony Deutsch; Writing by Alex Richardson and Philippa Fletcher; Editing by Peter Graff and Sharon Singleton)
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