At least 200 Palestinians have been killed since the fighting resumed Friday morning, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, even as the United States urged ally Israel to do everything possible to protect civilians.
“This is going to be very important going forward,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday after meetings with Arab foreign ministers in Dubai, wrapping up his third Middle East tour since the war started. “It’s something we’re going to be looking at very closely.”
Many of Israel’s attacks Saturday were focused on the Khan Younis area in southern Gaza, where the military said it had struck more than 50 Hamas targets with airstrikes, tank fire and its navy.
The military dropped leaflets the day before warning residents to leave but, as of late Friday, there had been no reports of large numbers of people leaving, according to the United Nations.
“There is no place to go,” lamented Emad Hajjar, who fled with his wife and three children from the northern town of Beit Lahia a month ago to seek refuge in Khan Younis.
“They expelled us from the north, and now they are pushing us to leave the south.”
Israel’s military said it also carried out strikes in the north, and hit more than 400 targets in all across the Gaza Strip.
Some 2 million people — almost Gaza’s entire population — are crammed into the territory’s south, where Israel urged people to relocate at the war’s start and has since vowed to extend its ground assault. Unable to go into north Gaza or neighboring Egypt, their only escape is to move around within the 220-square-kilometer (85-square-mile) area.
In response to US calls to protect civilians, the Israeli military released an online map, but it has done more to confuse than to help.
It divides the Gaza Strip into hundreds of numbered, haphazardly drawn parcels, sometimes across roads or blocks, and asks residents to learn the number of their location in case of an eventual evacuation.
“The publication does not specify where people should evacuate to,” the UN office for coordinating humanitarian issues in the Palestinian territory noted in its daily report. “It is unclear how those residing in Gaza would access the map without electricity and amid recurrent telecommunications cuts.”
Egypt has expressed concerns the renewed offensive could cause Palestinians to try and cross into its territory. In a statement late Friday, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said the forced transfer of Palestinians “is a red line.”
The renewed hostilities have also heightened concerns for 136 hostages who, according to the Israeli military, are still held captive by Hamas and other militants after 105 were freed during the truce. For families of remaining hostages, the truce’s collapse was a blow to hopes their loved ones could be the next out after days of seeing others freed. The Israeli army said Friday it had confirmed the deaths of four more hostages, bringing the total known dead to seven.
During the truce, Israel freed 240 Palestinians from its prisons. Most of those released from both sides were women and children.
The war began after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and other militants, who killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel and took around 240 people captive.
After the end of the truce, militants in Gaza resumed firing rockets into Israel, and fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah militants operating along its northern border with Lebanon.
HUMANITARIAN AID HALT
Hundreds of thousands of people fled northern Gaza to Khan Younis and other parts of the south earlier in the war, part of an extraordinary mass exodus that has left three-quarters of the population displaced and facing widespread shortages of food, water and other supplies.
Since the resumption of hostilities, no aid convoys or fuel deliveries have entered Gaza, and humanitarian operations within Gaza have largely halted, according to the UN
The International Rescue Committee, an aid group operating in Gaza, warned the return of fighting will “wipe out even the minimal relief” provided by the truce and “prove catastrophic for Palestinian civilians.”
Up until the truce began, more than 13,300 Palestinians were killed in Israel’s assault, roughly two-thirds of them women and minors, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The toll is likely much higher, as officials have only sporadically updated the count since Nov. 11. The ministry says thousands more people are feared dead under the rubble.
Israel says it is targeting Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighborhoods. Israel says 77 of its soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive in northern Gaza. It claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence.
A weeklong humanitarian pause in Gaza provided some respite for Palestinians in the beleaguered enclave. But the situation remains overwhelmingly bleak and, after the resumption of combat on Friday, potentially catastrophic.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israel on Thursday it must account for the safety of Palestinian civilians before resuming any military operations in Gaza, where the temporary truce allowed the exchange of captives held by Hamas for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
However, with Israeli officials vowing to continue total war against Hamas, presumably both in Gaza and the West Bank, hope for any recovery has been offset by the imminent threat of further violence in the absence of a permanent ceasefire.
Military vehicles manoeuvre next to a fence, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza. (Reuters/File)
Since Oct. 7, when Israel launched a military offensive in retaliation for a deadly attack by Hamas, Gaza has endured destruction, displacement, and suffering on an unprecedented scale.
Relentless Israeli airstrikes have reduced entire buildings to rubble, flattening more than 46,000 homes and damaging at least another 234,000, according to UN figures.
The onslaught has forced nearly three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million population from their homes, including the vast majority of the north’s residents.
Close to 15,000 Palestinians across the enclave have been killed, 40 percent of whom are children. A further 6,500 are believed to be missing or trapped under the destroyed buildings.
“Northern Gaza is a disaster zone where people feel it was a miracle to survive,” Ahmed Bayram, media adviser for the Middle East at the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Arab News.
“The sheer level of destruction and personal loss stretches beyond anything we have seen in Gaza. More people were killed in the first two weeks of this round of hostilities compared with the most recent large-scale conflict in 2014.”
Bayram said an estimated “1.7 million people have been displaced,” adding that “the few hundreds of thousands who remained in northern Gaza have done so because there is simply nowhere for them to go.”
Despite the seven-day suspension of hostilities, official Palestinian bodies and humanitarian organizations have been unable to pin down precise casualty figures, much less the number of people who could not leave northern Gaza.
“It has been very difficult to understand the numbers that remain in the north,” Oxfam’s policy lead Bushra Khalidi told Arab News. “From what we hear, it is between 200,000 and half-a-million still.”
She said an estimated 1.8 million people had been displaced to the south, “and they’re all crammed in this … what we could say, half the size of the original Gaza Strip.”
Following seven weeks of Israeli bombardment and Hamas rocket attacks, the two sides agreed on a four-day truce — which was later extended. The initial Qatar-mediated deal entailed the release of 50 Israeli hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
