In recent hours, Israel has gained new positions with its occupation troops in the southeast of Gaza. Despite expanding the area that they had already controlled since early Tuesday morning, this movement, in principle, does not imply a large-scale operation like the one that its ally the United States warns it will not support. Hamas released images this Friday in which members of the militia try to confront the Israeli military with grenade launchers, who attack tanks and buildings, supposedly in that area of the enclave. These military movements are accompanied by an increasingly intense displacement of the population due to fear that the operation will intensify.
The fighting is, however, more intense in the northern half of the Strip, where Israel confirmed this Friday the death of four members of the Nahal brigade, all 19 years old. The deaths were the result of a bomb explosion in the Zeitun neighborhood of Gaza City, in an area that Israel had considered controlled months ago. The objective that the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, claims to pursue is the annihilation of the battalions of the Palestinian fundamentalist group; However, after more than seven months of war, he has still not achieved this in any of the areas of the territory. The Palestinian group attacked the Israeli city of Beersheva this Friday with several rockets, launched from the Strip, about 35 kilometers in a straight line from the Palestinian enclave, causing minor injuries to a woman.
Israeli tanks took control of an important road in Rafah early this Friday, allowing the army to expand control of the eastern area of that town, according to the Reuters agency. Several residents have reported almost constant explosions and gunfire to the east and northeast of the city, with intense fighting. According to two sources close to Israel’s National Security Council, the “expansion of the area of operation” in Rafah has been approved, although they defend that it is a controlled maneuver, they have explained to the American media Axios.
In this way, Israel tries not to fuel the confrontation that it has had in recent days with the US Executive, which canceled the shipment of 3,500 bombs and criticized a possible military advance of greater proportions in Rafah, such as those that the army has carried out in other locations in Gaza during the conflict. In the Strip, 34,943 people have already died from Israeli attacks since the start of the war, according to the count of the Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas.
“There are thousands and thousands of people moving in cars, trucks, cars or walking,” explains Paulo Milanesio, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Gaza, from the Al Mawasi camping area, in the southwest of the enclave. That is where Israel is trying to expel thousands of Gazans who lived until this week in eastern Rafah, just a few kilometers below. Al Mawasi is not a safe area, Milanesio emphasizes in a video distributed by his organization, contrary to what was announced by the Israeli authorities. There, people must settle “under the bombs, helicopters, drones and the noise of bullets,” describes the worker of this NGO, who must also deploy his services to try to provide support to that population.
The crisis worsens while, as the UN and different humanitarian organizations denounce, Israel prevents access to aid both from its territory, through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and from Egypt, through the Rafah crossing. “The closure of the passage is not good for all these trucks because they are refrigerators, which means that the machine does not give fault warnings. If it stops working, all the food inside will spoil,” truck driver Ahmed al-Bayoumi told Reuters. The Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing was occupied by Israeli troops on Tuesday. Since then, they have been deploying soldiers and tanks in that area in the southeast of the enclave, after ordering civilians to leave.
Humanitarian organizations that try to serve citizens are also victims of the transfer and must move at the same time as the expelled population. Given the advance of the troops, MSF teams have stopped providing care at the maternity ward at the Al Emirati hospital in Rafah; although they hope to reopen the facilities at the Nasr hospital in Khan Younis, a place from which the Israeli army expelled them in February. “Since the beginning of this war, we have witnessed how medical and civil infrastructures are being attacked, which is why, from MSF, we ask for a lasting ceasefire,” Milanesio claimed.
Meanwhile, the fate and whereabouts of some 130 Israeli hostages – many of them already dead – remain up in the air, captured on October 7 by Hamas, when the war began, after the murder of 1,200 people at the hands of Palestinian militiamen. His release is pending a ceasefire being reached, which is not currently foreseen after the end of the latest negotiations in Cairo.
This Friday, the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, clashed with the ultranationalist Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, over the budget allocated to acquiring American weapons. Gallant believes that his colleague in the Executive is delaying the purchase of combat aircraft that he considers necessary at this time. This delay, according to the Defense Minister, will mean that Israel will have to spend much more money in the future for the same weapons. The delay comes at a time when, according to Gallant, the country should double the defense budget to deal with events such as the April 14 attack by Iran.