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Israel said on Tuesday its troops were advancing into the Gaza Strip and attacking “hundreds” of Hamas targets, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected calls for a ceasefire and said it was “a time for war”.
Israeli troops were operating across the north of the Mediterranean enclave, “engaging with Hamas combatants” and “attacking them on the ground and from the air”, said Jonathan Conricus, spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, in a briefing.
Netanyahu’s office said the IDF had struck about 300 targets in the enclave over the past 24 hours, including anti-tank missile and rocket-launch posts as well as military compounds inside underground tunnels. It said there had been “several engagements of militant cells”.
Meanwhile, Hamas said it had targeted two Israeli tanks and bulldozers in north-west Gaza using Al-Yassin 105 missiles, and fired mortars at Israeli infantry troops near the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south of the strip.
The fighting came as Israel was buoyed by the first successful rescue of a Hamas captive in the territory. The IDF said Ori Megidish, one of 241 hostages Israeli authorities said were seized by Hamas during the October 7 attack, was back with her family and “doing well”.
But in a sign of the dangers of the conflict spreading across the region, air raid sirens went off around the city of Eilat in southern Israel on Tuesday, as the Israeli military said it had downed an approaching “aerial target”. An IDF spokesman said there was “no threat or risk to civilians”.
More than 1,400 people died in Hamas’s bloody rampage through southern Israel, according to Israeli officials, making it the deadliest attack on Israeli soil in the country’s 75-year history.
Israel responded by declaring war on Hamas and vowing to crush the organisation, which has run Gaza since 2007. More than 8,300 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of the strip, according to the health ministry in Gaza, and more than 29,000 injured.
International aid groups have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in the impoverished enclave. The UN said basic services were deteriorating and medicine, fuel, food and water were about to run out.
Israel has told Palestinians living in the north of Gaza to evacuate to the south, away from what the IDF describes as Hamas’s “centre of gravity”. But aid agencies said many people, including the sick and wounded, were unable to move. They have also stressed that the south, too, has been hit by Israeli air strikes.
UNRWA, the main UN agency providing relief in Gaza, said more than 670,000 Palestinians had left their homes in what it described as a “forced displacement”.
Speaking to the UN Security Council on Monday evening, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said they had sought shelter in overcrowded schools and buildings run by the UN, living in “appalling, unsanitary conditions, with limited food and water, sleeping on the floor without mattresses, or outside, in the open”.
He said Israel was exacting “collective punishment” on Gaza’s civilian population. “The level of destruction is unprecedented, the human tragedy unfolding under our watch is unbearable. No place is safe in Gaza.”
Lazzarini said 64 UNRWA employees had been killed in just over three weeks, the latest casualty an official killed with his wife and eight children.
With the humanitarian situation in Gaza deteriorating, pressure has been growing on Israel to pause the fighting — an option Netanyahu has ruled out.
“Calls for a ceasefire are a call for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terror, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen,” he said on Monday evening. “The Bible says there is a time for peace and a time for war. Now is the time for war.”
A senior UN official warned that the war between Israel and Hamas risked spilling over into Syria, which has not found a political solution to its 12-year conflict.
Geir Pedersen, the UN envoy for Syria, told the Security Council the Syrian people faced “a terrifying prospect of a potential wider escalation”, following Hamas’s attack and Israel’s retaliation.
“Spillover into Syria is not just a risk; it has already begun,” he said.
He pointed to air strikes on airports in Aleppo and Damascus, widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli forces, and retaliation by the US for what it said were multiple attacks on its forces “by groups that it claims are backed by Iran, including on Syrian territory”.
The Israel-Hamas conflict has also led to a flare-up in hostilities on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where IDF forces have been engaged in escalating cross-border fire with the Iran-backed militant group Hizbollah in recent weeks.
Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi in Beirut
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