Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the army to prepare to “evacuate” hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza’s Rafah, his office said Friday, after Washington warned it would not support any ground assault.
This from newsmax.com.
Rafah is the last major population center in the Gaza Strip that Israeli troops have yet to enter. The city is also the main point of entry for desperately needed relief supplies.
Netanyahu’s planned offensive on Rafah—where an estimated 1.3 million civilians have sought refuge—drew condemnation from Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas who called it a “blatant violation of all red lines.”
The hawkish premier’s show of defiance against Israel’s main ally came after [The U.S. Regime] issued the strongest criticism yet of the conduct of the war, describing the response to Hamas’s October 7 attack as “over the top.”
According to his office, Netanyahu told military officials:
[To] submit to the cabinet a combined plan for evacuating the population and destroying the battalions of Hamas militants holed up in Rafah.
Palestinians displaced from other Gaza towns and cities have flooded into Rafah, where hundreds of thousands are sleeping in tents or on the streets.
Witnesses reported new strikes on Rafah overnight, after the Israeli military intensified air raids.
AFP images showed scenes of devastation in Rafah’s streets, where people queued for increasingly scarce water.
The people have reportedly said:
There is no safe place in Rafah. If they storm Rafah we will die in our homes. We have no choice. We don’t want to go anywhere else.
The Israeli army said:
[I]ts forces had eliminated 15 terrorists in the past day in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s biggest city.
Israeli forces raided the city’s Al-Amal Hospital on Friday after a weeks-long siege during which the Palestinian Red Crescent reported “intense artillery shelling and heavy gunfire.”
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said an Israeli ground operation in Rafah was “not something we’d support.”
Patel warned:
To conduct such an operation right now with no planning and little thought… would be a disaster.
He added:
Secretary of State Antony Blinken had conveyed Washington’s concerns to Netanyahu directly during talks this week in Jerusalem.
The European Union voiced alarm at the assault plan. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell posted on X:
It would have catastrophic consequences worsening the already dire humanitarian situation and the unbearable civilian toll.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said any Israeli push into Rafah:
[W]ould exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned against a major Israeli operation in Rafah. Its chief, Philippe Lazzarini said:
There’s a sense of growing anxiety and growing panic in Rafah. People have absolutely no idea where to go after Rafah.
Cairo hosted new talks Friday with Qatari and Hamas negotiators seeking a Gaza ceasefire and an agreement for a hostage-prisoner exchange.
A Hamas source told AFP there had been “positive and good discussions” in the Egyptian capital so far and expressed hopes for more progress.
The impact of the war has been felt widely, with violence involving Iran-backed allies of Hamas across the Middle East surging since October and drawing in US forces among others.
Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it fired dozens of rockets at an army position in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, hours after launching a salvo at northern Israel.
Friday’s attack came as Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian visited Beirut, and hours after Syria said it downed two drones near Damascus that it said entered its airspace from the Golan.
Sources on both sides of the border said:
[The attack] came a day after an Israeli strike on a car in the south Lebanon city of Nabatiyeh seriously wounded a Hezbollah commander.
On the same day, the U.S. military struck four unmanned surface vessels and seven cruise missiles it said Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi rebels had been set to launch against ships in the Red Sea
