Source : Perth Now news
Israeli air strikes have killed 17 people in Gaza’s Rafah overnight, medics have said, as more than a million Palestinians crammed into the border city await a full-blown offensive with the rest of their enclave in ruins and nowhere left to run.
Also on Saturday, relatives found the body of a six-year-old Palestinian girl who had begged rescuers to send help after being trapped in Gaza City by Israeli military fire, along with the bodies of five of her family members and two ambulance workers who had gone to save her.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) accused Israel of deliberately targeting the ambulance it sent to rescue Hind Rajab after she had spent hours on the phone to dispatchers begging for help.
Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Four months into the war in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said it has ordered the military to develop a plan to evacuate the population of Rafah and destroy four Hamas battalions it says are deployed there.
Unlike in previous Israeli assaults on cities during the war, when the military ordered civilians to flee south, no other relatively unscathed area remains in tiny Gaza and aid agencies have warned that large numbers of civilians could die.
“Any Israeli incursion in Rafah means massacres, means destruction. People are filling every inch of the city and we have nowhere to go,” said Rezik Salah, 35, who fled his Gaza City home with his wife and two children for Rafah early in the war.
The conflict in Gaza began on October 7 when Hamas gunmen stormed border defences to attack Israeli towns, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragging around 250 hostages back to Gaza according to Israeli tallies.
Israel responded with a massive bombardment and ground offensive in which about 28,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed, according to medical authorities in Hamas-run Gaza.
The conflict has threatened to spread across the Middle East, with Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah regularly trading fire, and flare-ups in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
On Saturday, an Israeli strike in Lebanon targeted a Palestinian figure close to Hamas, security sources said. The target survived but three others were killed. Also in Lebanon the Iran-backed armed faction Hezbollah said it had seized an Israeli Skylark drone “in good condition”.
Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, with Israeli forces destroying swathes of towns with air strikes, artillery fire and controlled detonations, leaving more than 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants homeless.
Most of the displaced have sought shelter in Rafah, in the far south on the border with Egypt, but after ceasefire talks failed, Netanyahu this week said Israeli forces would fight on until “total victory”, including in Rafah.
On Friday night an air strike on one Rafah house killed 11 people and wounded dozens more, while a second strike killed six people in another house, medical officials said.
An Israeli official who declined to be named said that Israel would try to organise for people in Rafah to be moved back northwards ahead of any assault.
Egypt has said it will not allow any mass displacement of Palestinians into its territory. Palestinians fear that Israel means to drive them from their homeland then forbid their return.
“There is limited space and great risk in putting Rafah under further military escalation due to the growing number of Palestinians there,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said on Saturday, warning that an escalation would have “dire consequences”.
Continued warfare in Gaza City, long after Israel said it was redeploying some troops to other areas, shows the limitations of any proposal to evacuate displaced people from Rafah to other parts of the enclave.
There is also continuing military action In the other main southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. The Palestinian Health Ministry voiced alarm at Israeli operations around the main Nasser Hospital where there are 300 medical staff, 450 patients and 10,000 people sheltering.
The United Nations said Palestinian civilians in Rafah require protection, but there should be no forced mass displacement, which is barred by international law.
