Israel tells ‘everyone in Gaza City’ to leave
Israel has told ‘everyone in Gaza City’ to evacuate as Hamas resurfaces in areas it previously claimed were under Israeli control.
The Israeli army spread orders online and through leaflets for the city’s roughly 250,000 inhabitants to leave through “safe corridors” before it becomes a “dangerous combat zone”.
The army said its troops were fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in a UN building in Gaza city on Thursday where they discovered weapons, including explosive drones and rocket-propelled grenades.
Gaza City in the north of the strip was one of the first places to be evacuated early in Israel’s war with Hamas, which followed the terror group’s attacks on Oct 7.
People started to return to their homes, many on foot, after Israel declared much of the north under its control and moved operations south.
The admission that Hamas is now resurfacing in the north undermines Benjamin Netanyahu’s message in April that Israel was “a step away” from victory. It also suggests the government’s stated aim of “wiping Hamas from the face of the earth” was wildly ambitious.
Officials have been quoted as saying that it would take a year to defeat Hamas, but Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesman, told ABC News on Saturday that Hamas would still be present in Gaza in five years.
Israel issued its evacuation order for Gaza City early on Wednesday, two weeks into operations in Shejaiya, a neighbourhood in Gaza City, where the army said it had killed more than 150 terrorists.
On Thursday, the IDF announced it had also killed Hassan Abu Kuik, a head of Hamas’s security operations, and Naser Mehanna, a team commander in Hamas’s military intelligence.
Hamas’s health ministry reported dozens of civilians killed in the Shejaiya operation while the UN said it was “appalled” that Israel was sending civilians to “already seriously overcrowded” areas.
The fighting in the north comes as Israel continues with operations in the southernmost city of Rafah, where rockets were fired at Israel on Thursday morning.
The IDF said it had dismantled sites rigged with explosives and tunnel shafts, killing “dozens of terrorists”.
Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, claimed on Wednesday that 60 per cent of Hamas’s estimated 30,000 members in Gaza have either been killed or wounded.
Negotiations for an indirect ceasefire continued this week, with David Barnea, the Mossad chief, leading the Israeli delegation to Qatar.
Mr Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is under pressure from families and protesters to strike a deal with Hamas that would free the remaining 120 hostages held in Gaza.
Both Mr Gallant and Herzi Halevi, the IDF’s chief of general staff, publicly supported a ceasefire deal on Wednesday, with Mr Halevi saying: “An agreement for the return of the hostages, beyond its urgent moral importance of saving lives, embodies the basic values required for an exemplary society and a society that values life.
Mr Netanyahu has been widely criticised for his public remarks as the negotiations resumed last week, insisting that “any deal will allow Israel to resume fighting until all objectives of the war have been achieved”.
Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader responded: “What is it good for? We are at a critical moment in the negotiations, the lives of the hostages depend on it; why issue such provocative messages? How does it contribute to the process?”
Two of Mr Netanyahu’s coalition partners and members of the security cabinet, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, oppose any deal with Hamas that would end the war and free the hostages, threatening to topple the government if a deal goes through.
But a senior Israeli official said that if a good deal is on the table it will happen, adding: “Netanyahu wants a deal and he will support it even if Itamar Ben-Gvir won’t approve.”
When asked if a ceasefire deal was close, John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, told CNN on Wednesday: “We are cautiously optimistic that things are moving in a good direction.”