Israeli tanks advanced deep into Rafah on Wednesday, killing eight people, according to residents and Palestinian medics.
The tanks entered five neighbourhoods after midnight, residents said. They said the tents of displaced families came under heavy shelling and gunfire in the Al-Mawasi neighbourhood, west of the coastal enclave.
Twelve Palestinians were also killed in an Israeli strike on a group of citizens and traders in the southern Gaza Strip, medical sources told Reuters on Wednesday. The people were killed as they waited for convoys of trucks carrying goods through Kerem Shalom on the Salahuddin road northeast of Rafah, the sources added.
Israeli troops have destroyed much of Gaza and seized most of the Palestinian territory, but have failed to achieve Israel’s stated goal of destroying Hamas and freeing Israeli hostages.
Residents say the Israeli military blew up several homes in western Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people lived until last month, when Israel launched a ground offensive and forced most of the population north.
Some UN and Palestinian figures put the number of those remaining at less than 100,000. One Rafah resident said:
Another night of horror in Rafah. They opened fire from planes, drones and tanks on the western areas to cover for their invasion. Bullets and shells landed in the Mawasi area near where people slept, killing and wounding many.
Israel destroyed 70% of Gaza
Israel’s military operation in the town of Rafah on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt has resulted in the destruction of more than 70% of infrastructure facilities, the Associated Press quoted an excerpt from a statement by local administration spokesman Ahmed al-Sufi on Wednesday. The agency reported:
Israeli strikes destroyed more than 70 per cent of infrastructure structures in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Al-Sufi also accused the Israeli army of “systematic attacks on refugee camps in Rafah” and the destruction of “entire residential neighbourhoods” in one of the city’s districts.
The situation in the Middle East escalated after thousands of Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip infiltrated into Israel on October 7. On that day, Hamas fired several thousand rockets into Israel and announced the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country was at war. Israel then launched the Iron Swords military operation in the Gaza Strip.
Hezbollah’s warning to Israel
In a televised address on Wednesday, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said that “there will be no safe place in Israel from our rockets and drones” if a wider war breaks out. He said the group also has a “bank of targets” it can strike precisely.
Israel “knows what awaits it in the Mediterranean …. In the face of a battle of this magnitude, it knows what must now await us on land, in the air and at sea,” Nasrallah added.
Hezbollah has been exchanging fire with Israel for more than eight months in parallel with the war in Gaza. On Tuesday, the Iranian-backed group released drone footage of important military installations deep inside Israeli territory.
