A few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu reaffirmed in a televised speech that “there will be ground intervention” in Gaza, army tanks made a brief incursion into the north of the strip to prepare the “battlefield” for the “next stages of the combat” against the Islamist group Hamas, reported a military spokesman. The worst is yet to be seen, “this is just the beginning,” Netanyahu warned of the Israeli bombings that have killed 6,547 people since October 7, according to Gaza health authorities.
It is not the first time that Israeli troops have carried out “selective raids”, as a military spokesman has called them, within the Palestinian enclave since the Hamas attack on Israel, which left 1,400 dead in the south of the country. However, this is the first time that Israel has shown images of the raid, in which Israeli tanks are seen operating on the ground and firing at specific targets.
In the operation, “soldiers located and attacked numerous terrorists, terrorist infrastructure and anti-tank missile launch sites,” he explained. Thus, the Israeli forces “operated to prepare the battlefield” and “left the area at the end of the activity,” he stressed.
In turn, they added, “Israeli fighter jets attacked more than 250 targets” of Hamas in the last day, which included “operational command centers, tunnels and rocket launchers located in the heart of civilian areas,” from where The Army alleged that militias fired throughout the war.” In addition, naval troops “attacked a Hamas surface-to-air missile launch site in the Khan Younis area.”
For their part, the Palestinian militias in Gaza continued to launch rockets at different points in Israeli territory until Wednesday night, and for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, in the direction of the city of Eilat, in the extreme south of Israel.
From Gaza they reported that Israel continued its Israeli airstrikes last night and people living in central Gaza, near the Bureij refugee camp and east of the village of Qarara, reported intense tank shelling throughout the night. the night. Hamas did not comment directly on the Israeli information, but noted that its armed wing had attacked an Israeli helicopter east of Bureij. The Israeli military said it was “not aware of this.”
On Wednesday night, Netanyahu reaffirmed in a televised speech that “there will be ground intervention in Gaza” and that “they are working around the clock” in preparations, in coordination with Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi.
“I am not going to give details about when, how and how much, nor am I going to specify the various considerations that we are taking into account, many of which are not known to the people of Israel, which is positive, because we want to protect lives. of our soldiers,” he said.
On the other hand, the Israeli president reiterated the order for all Gazan civilians to leave the north of the Strip, despite the fact that there are no security conditions for this. Israeli bombs fall without pause also in southern Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians, half the population of the Gaza Strip, have been displaced. This is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis following Israel’s total cutoff of water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel. All the voices in Gaza repeat the same complaint: “there is no safe place in Gaza,” lamented this Thursday the UN humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, Lynn Hastings.
Likewise, many Gazans have not wanted or have not been able to evacuate because they have sick or disabled relatives, while many hospitals have already collapsed and cannot care for the more than 17,000 injured, the vast majority of them children, women and the elderly, since the humanitarian aid that has entered through the border with Egypt is insufficient. The lack of fuel, the entry of which has been vetoed by Israel, puts health care to the limit. The UN warned yesterday that if it did not receive fuel it would have to stop operating in the strip. One in three hospitals and two in three clinics have had to close.
The rising death toll in Gaza is unprecedented in the more than 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Much of the international community is concerned about an ever-imminent invasion, as the leaders of France and Egypt have recently expressed. A ground offensive promises to be difficult in the territory, one of the most populated in the world and riddled with tunnels where Hamas hides weapons and fighters. The loss of life will be much greater and the humanitarian situation will worsen. Likewise, the relatives of the 224 Israeli hostages who are held captive by the Islamic group also fear that their loved ones will suffer harm if a major operation is carried out.
