The Palestinian resistance group Hamas battled invading Israeli forces in and around Gaza’s main cities on Friday as Israel pressed on with its offensive in a conflict that has claimed thousands of Palestinian lives and left the besieged enclave in ruins.
Early Friday, the health ministry reported another 40 dead in strikes near Gaza City, and “dozens” more in Jabalia and Khan Yunis. The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, one of the leaders of a young generation of authors in Gaza who chose to write in English to tell their stories, was killed in an Israeli strike, his friends said overnight Thursday.
Israeli forces claimed to have encircled major urban centres as they seek to destroy Hamas. However, resistance fighters have continued to fight back and inflict losses on the invading forces. In a Thursday phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden “emphasised the critical need to protect civilians and to separate the civilian population from Hamas”, the White House said in a statement.
Biden also called for “corridors that allow people to move safely from defined areas of hostilities”. Backed by air power, tanks and armoured bulldozers, Israeli troops are fighting in Khan Yunis, the biggest city in southern Gaza, as well as in Gaza City and Jabalia district in the north.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that troops had closed in on the Khan Yunis home of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, 61, vowing “it is only a matter of time until we find him”. The fighting has pushed Gazans south, turning Rafah near the Egyptian border into a vast camp for many of the 1.9 million displaced by the conflict — 80 percent of Gaza’s population.
“Two months on the road, moving from one place to another. These are the hardest two months we have experienced in our lives,” said Abdallah Abu Daqqa, displaced from Khan Yunis to Rafah.—Agencies
