Israel confirmed yesterday what has been said for days, despite international pressure not to do so: its troops will advance to the southern tip of Gaza with the intention of putting an end to the “four battalions of Hamas in Rafah”, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
This decision will mean ordering the evacuation of displaced Palestinians who took refuge in the south, bordering Egypt, after the beginning of the Israeli invasion of the strip from the north. It is estimated that more than half of the 2.2 million Gazans moved south as the offensive progressed.
What Israel has not said is where it proposes to resettle the refugees once the entire strip is militarily occupied by troops. Netanyahu has called for an evacuation plan from southern Gaza. In any case, and despite the fact that the Israeli military had not descended further south of Khan Iunis by land – a city located less than ten kilometers from Rafah -, air bombardments and ground and naval artillery have been hitting Rafah since the beginning of the war
“It is clear that the intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians be evacuated from the combat areas”, states the statement distributed yesterday by the office of the Israeli Prime Minister. “It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war without eliminating Hamas and leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah,” he adds. The announcement ends by reporting that Netanyahu has ordered the armed forces and security agencies to “come up with a plan to evacuate the population and destroy the battalions.”
Israel’s announcement came after Netanyahu this week rejected Hamas’s counter-proposal for a cease-fire and the day after the United States warned the prime minister on Thursday that it would not support the evacuation and military intervention in Rafah. “We would not support it,” declared the spokesman for the National Security Council of the White House, John Kirby, who added that an operation like this would be a “disaster.”
Also on Thursday, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, raised the tone against Israel when he considered “exaggerated” the Israeli Government’s response to the terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7. “There are a lot of innocent people who are going hungry, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and this has to end,” Biden added.
In the same sense as Kirby, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, had declared on Wednesday, when he ended his fifth visit to the Middle East since the war began, that any “military operation undertaken by Israel must put the civilians first”, remarking that “this is especially true in the case of Rafah”.
For his part, the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, also warned yesterday of the “catastrophic consequences” that the invasion of Rafah would have.
Meanwhile, international humanitarian aid agencies, such as Unicef, have reiterated in recent hours that displaced Gazans are living in a borderline situation. In this sense, Hamas demanded in a statement yesterday the entry of a thousand trucks with humanitarian aid every day “until (Gaza) recovers from the famine and its impact”.
