Israel’s armed forces are ready to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and attack Hamas strongholds in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defense official said on Wednesday, despite international warnings about the risk of humanitarian catastrophe. .
A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said Israel was “going ahead” with a ground operation, but did not provide a timeline.
The official said Israel’s Defense Ministry had purchased 40,000 tents, each with capacity for 10 to 12 people, to house Palestinians relocated from Rafah before an attack.
A video circulating online appears to show rows of square white tents being erected in Khan Younis, a town about 5 km from Rafah. Reuters was unable to verify the veracity of the video, but analyzed images from satellite company Maxar Technologies, which showed tent camps on land owned by Khan Younis.
An Israeli government source said Netanyahu’s war cabinet planned to meet within the next two weeks to authorize the evacuation of civilians, which is expected to take about a month.
The defense official, who requested anonymity, told Reuters the military could take action immediately but was awaiting Netanyahu’s green light.
Rafah, which borders Egypt, is home to more than a million Palestinians who fled the Israeli offensive on the rest of Gaza and say the prospect of having to flee once again is terrifying.
“I have to decide whether to leave Rafah because my mother and I are afraid that an invasion will happen suddenly and we won’t have time to escape,” said Aya, 30, who is temporarily living in the city with her family at a school.
According to her, some families recently moved to a refugee camp in the coastal region of Al-Mawasi, but their tents caught fire when tank shells fell nearby. “Where are we going?”
WITH STRENGTH
Israel, which launched its war to annihilate Hamas after the Islamist group’s attacks on Israeli cities on October 7, says Rafah is home to four Hamas combat battalions, reinforced by thousands of retreating fighters, and that it needs to defeat it. them to achieve victory.
“Hamas has been hit hard in the northern sector. It has also been hit hard in the center of the Strip. And soon it will also be hit hard in Rafah,” Brigadier General Itzik Cohen, commander of Israel’s 162nd Division, told Kan public television. , which operates in Gaza.
Israel’s closest ally, Washington, however, called on the country to set aside attack plans and said Israel could deal with Hamas fighters by other means.
“We could not support a ground operation in Rafah without an appropriate, credible and executable humanitarian plan, precisely because of the complications in delivering assistance,” David Satterfield, US special envoy for humanitarian affairs, told reporters on Tuesday. in the Middle East.
“We continue discussions with Israel about what we believe are alternative ways of dealing with a challenge that we recognize, which is Hamas’ military presence in Rafah.”
Egypt warns that it will not allow Gazans to be pushed across the border into its territory. Cairo warned Israel against advancing on Rafah, which “would lead to mass human massacres, losses (and) widespread destruction”, its State Information Service said.
Israel withdrew most of its ground troops from southern Gaza this month, but maintained airstrikes and carried out incursions into areas its troops had abandoned. Efforts by the United States, Egypt and Qatar to broker an extended ceasefire in time to prevent an attack on Rafah have so far failed.
Medical officials in Gaza say more than 34,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign, and thousands more bodies are feared under the rubble.
Hamas killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 253 as of October 7, according to Israeli records. Of those hostages, 129 remain in Gaza, according to Israeli officials. More than 260 Israeli soldiers have been killed in ground fighting since October 20, according to the army.
HA Hellyer, senior associate fellow for international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said he expects the Rafah attack “sooner or later” because Netanyahu is under pressure to achieve his stated goals of rescuing the hostages and killing all the leaders. of Hamas.
“The Rafah invasion is inevitable, because of the way he has structured all of this,” he said, warning that it will not be possible for everyone to leave the city. Therefore, “if he sends the military to Rafah, there will be many casualties.”
(Writing by Dan Williams; additional reporting by Andrew MacAskill and Nidal al-Mughrabi)
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