GAZA/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/RAFAH: Israeli tanks and troops pressed towards Gaza City on Thursday but met fierce resistance from Hamas group using mortars and hit-and-run attacks from tunnels as the Palestinian death toll from nearly four weeks of bombardments mounted.
At the southern end of the besieged enclave, foreign passport-holders were being allowed out through the Rafah crossing into Egypt.
The war is closing in on the Gaza Strip’s main population centre in the north, where the Hamas group is based and where Israel has been telling people to leave as it vows to annihilate Hamas once and for all.
“We are at the gates of Gaza City,” Israeli military commander Brigadier General Itzik Cohen said.
Fighters of Hamas and its ally were emerging from tunnels to fire at tanks, then disappearing back into the network, residents said and videos from both groups showed, in guerrilla-style operations against a far more powerful army.
“They never stopped bombing Gaza City all night, the house never stopped shaking,” said one man living there, asking not to be identified by name.
“But in the morning we discover the Israeli forces are still outside the city, in the outskirts and that means the resistance is heavier than they expected.” Israeli officers have stressed the difficulties of fighting in an urban environment.
The strategy appears for now to concentrate large forces in the northern Gaza Strip rather than launch a ground assault on the entire territory. The latest war in the decades-old conflict began when Hamas fighters broke through the border on Oct. 7.
Israel says they killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 200 hostages in the deadliest day of its 75-year history.
Israel’s ensuing bombardment of the small Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people has killed at least 8,796 people, including 3,648 children, according to Gaza health authorities.
Though Western nations and the United States in particular have traditionally supported Israel, harrowing images of bodies in the rubble and hellish conditions inside Gaza have triggered appeals for restraint and street protests around the world.
Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows, however, that his career and legacy depend on crushing Hamas.
‘Hamas has prepared well’
Residents reported mortar fire throughout the night in areas around Gaza City and said Israeli tanks and bulldozers were sometimes driving over rubble and knocking down structures rather than using regular roads as planes bombed from overhead.
Brigadier General Iddo Mizrahi, chief of Israel’s military engineers, told Army Radio troops were in a first stage of opening access routes in Gaza.
“This is certainly terrain that is more heavily sown than in the past with minefields and booby-traps,” he said.
Israel says it attacked Hamas inside Gaza tunnels
“Hamas has learned and prepared itself well.”
After a total blockade of Gaza for more than three weeks, foreign passport-holders and some severely wounded people were being allowed out.
Palestinian border official Wael Abu Mehsen said 400 foreign citizens would leave for Egypt via the Rafah crossing on Thursday, after at least 320 on Wednesday. Another 60 critically injured Palestinians would be crossing too, Mehsen added.
Israel’s latest strikes have included the heavily-populated area of Jabalia that was set up as a refugee camp in 1948.
Gaza’s Hamas-run media office said at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the two hits on Tuesday and Wednesday, with 120 missing and at least 777 people hurt.
“It is a massacre,” said one person on the scene as people desperately hunted for trapped victims. Israel, which accuses Hamas group of hiding behind civilians, said it killed two Hamas leaders in Jabalia.
With Arab nations increasingly vocal in their outrage at Israel’s actions, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also expressed concern that Israel’s “disproportionate attacks…could amount to war crimes”.
The Israeli military said on Thursday another soldier had died in the Gaza fighting, bringing to 17 the number killed since ground operations were expanded on Friday.
Israeli troops had killed “dozens of terrorists”, it added. Violence has also spread to the occupied West Bank, with Israeli military raids to arrest suspected Hamas fighters touching off confrontations with gunmen and people throwing stones.
Palestinian medics said three teenagers were killed there by Israeli army fire early on Thursday. Israeli military spokespeople had no immediate comment. Separately, the military and medics said Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli motorist in the ocuupied West Bank.
There was no immediate claim for that from Palestinian factions.
‘We open our eyes on dead people’
As international calls for a “humanitarian pause” in hostilities go unheeded, conditions are atrocious in Gaza, with food, fuel, drinking water and medicine all running short.
“We open our eyes on dead people and we close our eyes on dead people,” said Dr Fathi Abu al-Hassan, a US passport holder waiting to cross into Egypt on Wednesday. Hospitals, including Gaza’s only cancer hospital, are struggling due to fuel shortages.
Israel has refused to let humanitarian convoys bring in fuel, citing concern that Hamas fighters would divert it for military use.
Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Gaza health ministry, said the main power generator at the Indonesian Hospital was no longer functioning.
The hospital was switching to a back-up generator but would no longer be able to power mortuary refrigerators and oxygen generators.
Israel bombs Gaza ahead of potential ground assault
“If we don’t get fuel in the next few days, we will inevitably reach a disaster,” he said. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due to depart on Thursday for his third visit to Israel in less than a month.
He plans to meet Netanyahu on Friday to voice solidarity with its close ally but also to reassert the need to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, his spokesperson said.
Blinken will also stop in Jordan, one of a handful of Arab states to have normalised relations with Israel.
On Wednesday, though, Jordan withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest at the assault on Gaza.
Death toll rises to 9,061 in Gaza: health ministry
The health ministry in the Gaza Strip said on Thursday the death toll there since the start of Israel’s war against Hamas had surpassed 9,000.
The ministry said 9,061 had been killed since the war began with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. Of these, 3,760 were children and an additional 32,000 had been wounded, it added.
Hundreds more foreign nationals flee Gaza
Hundreds more foreigners and dual nationals fled war-torn Gaza for Egypt on Thursday as Israeli forces bombarded and fought ground battles in the besieged Palestinian territory, where thousands have died.
Egypt said it eventually plans to help evacuate 7,000 foreigners through the Rafah crossing and a spokesman for the Palestinian side of the border post said about 100 had been able to leave on Thursday.
A total of 400 foreign passport holders as well as 60 severely wounded Palestinians in ambulances were due to cross by the end of the second day of departures, Wael Abu Mohsen said, and Egyptian officials later reported the first arrivals.
A list of those approved to travel on Thursday shows hundreds of US citizens and 50 Belgians along with smaller numbers from various European, Arab, Asian and African countries.
“There was no food, no water, no gas, nowhere to take shelter,” said US passport holder Salma Shaath, 14, as she prepared to cross. “People were going to hospitals to sleep, there are a lot of martyrs, there is no internet, no communications and no electricity
“Our house was bombed and our situation was difficult, so we came here to Rafah, and now we’re planning to travel.”
The evacuation marks a tiny proportion of the 2.4 million people trapped in Gaza under weeks bombardment since Hamas launched a cross-border attack into Israel on October 7.
‘Whole families killed’
The Israeli army is also seeking to free around 240 hostages, both civilians and troops, captured by Hamas during the attacks.
On Thursday, the military claimed it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters.
“IDF fighters continue to advance in the Gaza City area and conduct face-to-face battles with Hamas and to deepen the fighting,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari told journalists.
“At the end of a battle that lasted several hours and included ground fighting and fire support from aircraft and a missile ship, many Hamas people were killed.”
Some 332 Israeli soldiers have already died in the October 7 attacks.
Now gruelling urban warfare lies ahead deeper inside Gaza, where Hamas is fighting from a tunnel network spanning hundreds of kilometres (miles).
Global concern has risen sharply over Israel’s response, in which the army says it has struck more than 12,000 targets so far.
Special concern has focused on repeated heavy strikes on Gaza’s largest refugee camp – densely populated Jabalia, north of Gaza City – where Israeli airstrikes brought down residential buildings.
Gaza government said 195 were killed in two days of Israeli strikes on Jabalia, with hundreds more missing and wounded.
Hamas said seven of the estimated 242 hostages it is holding, died in Tuesday’s bombings.
Major strikes also hit Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp and an area near a UN-run school, where the health ministry said 27 had died.
Outside the Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City, displaced residents seeking shelter from Israeli strikes told AFP that civilians would not withstand the barrage much longer.
“This is not a life. We need a safe place for our kids,” said 50-year-old Hiyam Shamlakh. “Everybody is terrified, children, women and the elderly.”
Talal Shamlakh, 65, said: “There have been missiles since 7:00am around the hospital and we couldn’t sleep while children are screaming.”
Another Gazan, Mahmoud Abu Jarad, said civilians would not be able to tolerate another week of strikes. “We demand a ceasefire. This is the most important thing,” the 30-year-old said.