The Israeli army said on Friday that its forces had advanced towards the center of Rafah, advancing further towards the southern Gaza city despite international backlash and pressure from allies to scale back the latest offensive and agree to a ceasefire. .
Israeli special forces were participating in “targeted intelligence-based raids” in central Rafah, the Israeli military said in a statement. He added that troops were conducting “focused, low-intensity operations” in the city. On Wednesday, the military announced that it had established “operational control” over the border area with Egypt, an eight-mile-long strip known as the Philadelphia Corridor outside Rafah.
Commercially available satellite images taken by Planet Labs on Thursday showed that the Israeli army had established positions in parts of central Rafah, while military vehicles and tanks could be seen as far as the outskirts of the Tel al-Sultan area in western Rafah. .
As fighting raged in Gaza, President Biden said Friday in Washington that it was time to end the war and reach a ceasefire. “At this point, Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7th,” Biden said from the White House. “It’s time for this war to end, for it to begin the day after.”
In a statement released after Biden’s comments, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “the war will not end until all of its objectives are achieved, including the return of all of our abductees and the elimination of military and government capabilities.” of Hamas. “
Despite nearly eight months of fighting, Israel has yet to achieve its stated goals of overthrowing Hamas and bringing home the approximately 125 remaining hostages kidnapped during the October 7 attack. Israeli officials have said shutting down Hamas’ cross-border smuggling network and rooting out militants in Rafah will be key steps toward those goals.
In the northern town of Jabaliya, another focal point of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, the army said it had carried out more than 200 airstrikes during weeks of intense fighting with Hamas militants. Israel said on Friday that its troops had withdrawn from eastern Jabaliya after recovering the bodies of seven hostages, killing hundreds of fighters and destroying several kilometers of a network of underground tunnels. The army said it was still conducting combat operations in central Gaza.
Military analysts have expressed skepticism that the offensive in Rafah would deal Hamas the decisive blow that Israel craves. But it has deepened the misery of Palestinians, who still face widespread hunger in the enclave. And since the offensive began, the amount of international aid arriving in southern Gaza has declined precipitously, the United Nations says, although there has been a slight uptick in the arrival of commercial goods lately.
Tzachi Hanegbi, the Israeli national security adviser, said on Wednesday that Israel’s military operations in Gaza would likely continue until the end of the year. Hanegbi, a senior Netanyahu adviser, said in a radio interview that fighting would continue for months more to “underpin the achievement” against Hamas.
The Israeli army has returned several times to some parts of Gaza after the resurgence of Hamas fighters. An Israeli media outlet described the latest mission in Jabaliya as a “second cleanup.”
Residents who returned to the once densely populated urban area of Jabaliya and its surrounding areas on Friday expected to find significant destruction. What they saw instead was a flattened landscape buried with debris where even the bushes had been destroyed.
“The destruction is indescribable,” said Mohammad Awais, who returned with his family to their home in Jabaliya on Friday. “Our minds are not able to comprehend what we are seeing.”
He said he and his family walked along devastated roads for nearly an hour in the heat and saw that no vehicles could navigate streets blocked by piles of rubble from pulverized homes and shops. As they walked, they passed rescuers carrying the wounded and dead on stretchers. Some bodies were found in the streets, others had been dug up and pulled from the rubble, and were already beginning to decompose, said Awais, a social media marketing specialist.
“Not even ambulances can pass through them to transport the wounded and the martyrs,” he said of the streets of Jabaliya.
Some buildings had already been destroyed before the latest Israeli offensive in the area, according to images from April. But by late May, many more structures in those areas appeared flattened and almost all vegetation had been destroyed.
Mr Awais and his family are among the few residents who still have a place to return to, as their home was only partially damaged. On Friday they began clearing parts of collapsed walls, fragments of wood and glass and ruined furniture so they could return to live there. But the family supermarket, which closed in December amid Israel’s invasion, was completely destroyed, he said.
Satellite photos of eastern Rafah from May 22 show similar scenes of devastation since the offensive there began in early May. The area around the border crossing with Egypt, captured by Israeli troops in a night operation on May 7, appears as a desolate desert on satellite images.
Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general, said Friday that the offensive in Rafah would likely continue for weeks as Israeli forces destroyed tunnels in controlled demolitions and fought in parts of the city against remaining militants.
To prevent Hamas from rearming, Israeli forces would remain in the border area near Egypt for the foreseeable future, said General Brom, who headed the army’s strategic planning division. Israeli officials, he said, have yet to move toward the only other feasible option: handing over security responsibility to a new administration.
Senior Israeli officials have expressed frustration with Netanyahu for failing to articulate a clear war exit strategy, and a centrist member of Israel’s war cabinet, Benny Gantz, recently said he would leave the government if he did not develop a plan for Gaza. before June 8.
As long as Israel does not have a diplomatic end to Gaza, its forces will remain bogged down in constant battles against Palestinian militants there, General Brom said.
“All kinds of operations will be launched, and they will all have military logic, but they will not be part of any clear strategy,” General Brom said, adding that weakening Hamas under Israeli military rule in Gaza “could take years.”
Lauren Leatherby, Christian Triebert and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.