The Israeli military says it has completely encircled Gaza City after more than a week of heavy fighting, in effect severing the territory into two, as Israeli ground troops appeared poised to enter the dense urban sprawl from the south.
What seemed to be the beginning of the second stage of the Israeli ground operation was accompanied by a barrage of 16 rockets fired from southern Lebanon towards the Israeli city of Haifa on Monday afternoon.
The rocket fire, for which Hamas claimed responsibility, reached the farthest distance of any projectiles from the Lebanese side of the border fired by either the Palestinian militant group or Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia – a sign that escalation on Israel’s northern front is still an active threat even as fighting intensifies in Gaza.
Israel’s encirclement of Gaza City comes a month after Hamas conducted its murderous rampage across southern Israel on 7 October, killing 1,400 Israelis and taking about 240 people hostage, the worst attack in the country’s history. Israel swiftly said it was at war with Hamas and the toll on civilians in Gaza has been horrifying.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned that the Gaza Strip was becoming “a graveyard for children” as he called again for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
“We must act now to find a way out of this brutal, awful, agonising dead end of destruction,” Guterres told reporters at the UN. “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day.”
The Hamas-run local health authority said more than 10,000 Palestinians had been killed by airstrikes and artillery fire. The territory’s 2.3 million civilians have no safe place to go, but with food, water, fuel and medical supplies dwindling, international calls for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire have been firmly rejected by Israel, which has vowed to crush the militants’ operational capabilities.
Moving under the cover of intensive aerial bombardments on Sunday night from air, land and sea – accompanied by a communications blackout – Israeli troops moved to surround Gaza City as Hamas militants were reported to have pulled back to prepared positions deeper in the densely packed territory.
Sunday’s airstrikes were the most ferocious on the territory since the war broke out. It was not immediately clear what had been hit in the centre of Gaza City, as huge plumes of fire and smoke rose into the night air.
“Today there is north Gaza and south Gaza,” R Adm Daniel Hagari said, calling it a “significant stage” in Israel’s war against the Hamas militant group ruling the territory. Israeli media reported that troops were expected to enter Gaza City in force within the next 48 hours.
The fate of the hostages – of whom the only signs of life came in a video released by Hamas showing three women – also complicates the offensive. On Tuesday, a month since their abduction, the families are expected to protest at the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism, as well as at the Knesset, over what they say are inadequate efforts to reach a deal with Hamas to release their loved ones.
The latest moves on the ground in the Gaza Strip were accompanied by mounting speculation over the kind of fighting that would unfold in Gaza City’s streets, amid suggestions that the Israel Defence Forces would try to avoid costly warfare within Hamas’s tunnel system.
In a briefing with reporters on Monday, the IDF spokesperson, Lt Col Richard Hecht, said the army was striving to maintain humanitarian corridors so that people could flee to the south of the territory, but acknowledged that if Hamas was believed to be using the roads, the IDF would not hesitate to attack there.
He also echoed comments by senior IDF commanders that Hamas was using medical infrastructure, including Gaza City’s Dar al-Shifa, Indonesian and Qatari hospitals, to hide underground and launch rocket salvoes.
In response to a question about whether Israel was now treating the hospitals as military targets, Hecht said: “This is one of our biggest challenges. We haven’t struck any hospitals yet. When it comes, we will discuss it.”
The New York Times quoted officials as saying the White House had sent messages to Iran and Hezbollah that the US would be prepared to intervene militarily if they joined Hamas in attacking Israel. On Sunday, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, reiterated the US position that it was committed to deterring “any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this conflict”. An Ohio-class guided missile-carrying submarine has been sent to the region.
In a phone call on Monday with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the US president, Joe Biden, repeated a request to protect Palestinians, but there were few signs that the calls for restraint were being heard.
Asked about civilian casualties on Monday, a White House spokesperson said: “We have seen some indications that there are efforts being applied in certain scenarios to try to minimise, but I don’t want to overstate that.”
In another sign of widening unrest, a Palestinian man stabbed and wounded two members of Israel’s paramilitary border police in East Jerusalem before being shot dead, according to police.
Tensions remain high with Lebanon, where on Sunday an Israeli strike on a car in the south of the country killed three children and their grandmother, Lebanese authorities said. Israel’s chief military spokesperson said the military had attacked “terrorist targets of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon” in response to a missile attack against tanks that killed an Israeli citizen.
About 1.5 million Palestinians, or approximately 70% of Gaza’s population, are estimated to have fled their homes since the war began, following Israeli orders to evacuate to “safe zones” in the southern half of the strip, which have still been bombed. UN officials say civilians are surviving on two pieces of bread a day, made from flour from their stores, and access to clean water is a constant problem. Another 75 aid trucks made it into Gaza via Egypt on Sunday, bringing the total to 525 since 21 October, although aid agencies say the supplies are a fraction of what is needed to stave off humanitarian disaster. On Monday, evacuations of foreigners, dual nationals and wounded Palestinians resumed, the Hamas government said.
The IDF said that water and humanitarian goods were available in the south of Gaza, but that Hamas was impeding convoys by firing on them.
Hazem al-Enezi, the director of an orphanage in Gaza City housing 27 children, said he and the institute’s sole remaining staff member had managed to evacuate the children to an apartment belonging to a friend in the south of Gaza City on Friday after ground fighting drew too close to the building.
They moved the children in civilian cars with the help of neighbours, beset by artillery fire. One of the vehicles was running on cooking fuel rather than petrol as dwindling fuel supplies were directed to keeping hospital generators functioning.
“I prayed to God we would make it,” he said. “We have moved, but we don’t have that many supplies for the young children.”
Amid mounting diplomatic efforts by the US to secure a humanitarian pause in the fighting, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, for talks in Ankara.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, travelled across Turkey’s remote north-east on Monday in an apparent snub of Washington’s top diplomat.
The US diplomat has been facing a chorus of Arab calls to support an immediate ceasefire. Foreign ministers from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates met Blinken in Amman on Saturday and also urged him to persuade Israel to agree to a ceasefire. Blinken visited Iraq on Sunday and held talks with the prime minister, Mohammed al-Sudani.
Jordan’s military airdropped urgent medical aid to a Jordanian field hospital in Gaza early on Monday, according to a social post from Jordan’s king and reports in state media.
