CAIRO (Reuters) – Israel sent tanks to Djabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Sunday after a night of intense air and ground operations that left at least 19 dead and dozens injured, according to the services health.
Djabalia is the largest of Gaza’s eight refugee camps. Most of the 100,000 inhabitants are descendants of Palestinians expelled from the towns and villages of what is now Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the year the Jewish state was born.
On Saturday evening, the Israeli army said that the forces operating in Djabalia aimed to prevent Hamas from reestablishing its military capabilities there.
According to Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, Israeli forces operating in the Zeitoun district of Gaza killed around 30 Palestinian militants.
“The air and ground bombings have not stopped since yesterday, they are bombing everywhere, including near schools which house people who have lost their homes,” said Saed, 45, a resident of Djabalia.
“The war is starting again,” he told Reuters via an app.
The new incursion has forced many families to flee.
The army sent tanks to Al-Zeitoun, an eastern suburb of Gaza City, as well as to Al-Sabra, where residents reported heavy shelling that included destroying high-rise apartment buildings.
The IDF claimed to have taken control of most of these areas months ago.
The Israeli army said it had opened a new crossing point at Erez to transport humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, in coordination with the United States.
MORE THAN 35,000 PALESTINIAN DEATHS, ACCORDING TO THE MINISTRY
In Deir Al-Balah, residents and Hamas media reported the presence of Israeli tanks and bulldozers on the outskirts of the town, sparking a shootout with Hamas fighters.
In an airstrike on Saturday evening in Deir Al-Balah, two doctors, a father and his son, were killed, health authorities said.
The military wing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said their fighters attacked the IDF in several areas of Gaza with anti-tank rockets and mortar shells, including in Rafah, where more than a million people have taken refuge.
The war was sparked by a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israel.
The Israeli military operation in Gaza left at least 35,034 dead and 78,755 injured on the Palestinian side, according to a latest report, published Sunday, by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The bombings devastated the coastal enclave and caused a serious humanitarian crisis.
On Sunday, thousands of families again left Rafah, where the Israeli army issued evacuation orders for certain neighborhoods in the center of the city bordering Egypt.
“Leaving Rafah, I passed through Khan Younes, I cried, I didn’t know if I was crying because of what I was going through, the humiliation and the feeling of loss that I felt or because of what I saw,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza resident displaced to Rafah.
“I saw a ghost town, all the buildings on both sides of the road, entire neighborhoods were wiped out. People are fleeing to safety, knowing that there is no safe place, and that there is no tent and no one to look after them,” he told Reuters.
For Burai, a Palestinian businessman, Palestinians have been abandoned by the world and left to fend for themselves as the war enters its eighth month.
“No ceasefire, no UN decision, no hope,” he said.
NO PLAN FOR CIVILIANS
Furthermore, the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, justified on Sunday Washington’s decision to suspend the delivery of certain weapons to Israel, affirming that the Jewish state did not have a “credible plan” to protect the civilian population .
Israel must “have a clear, credible plan to protect civilians, which we have not seen,” Antony Blinken told the American channel ABC News’ “This Week” television show.
If Israel “launches this major military operation in Rafah, then there are certain systems that we will no longer deliver,” warned Antony Blinken. “We have real concerns about how they are using (these systems).”
For his part, David Cameron, the British Foreign Minister, declared that he could not support an operation in Rafah in the absence of protection for the hundreds of thousands of civilians taking refuge in this border town in the south of the enclave.
But he rejected the idea of stopping selling arms to Israel in an interview with the BBC.
(Reporting Nidal al-Mughrabi; French version Elizabeth Pineau)
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