In the last 48 hours, the Israeli army has intensified its bombing and the advance of tanks in the city of Rafah, where it is trying to penetrate this Friday into the only two parts it does not control: the north and the west. Located on the border with Egypt, it is the area where a majority of the 2.3 million Gazans ended up concentrated for months after several forced displacements. Israel began its invasion at the beginning of May, first taking the border with Egypt – since closed to the entry of humanitarian aid – and then surrounding the city, where only between 50,000 and 100,000 people remain. Among them, militiamen who fight the Israeli advance with ambushes neighborhood by neighborhood. The rest, more than a million, have fled (both out of fear and by Israeli military order) to the expanded humanitarian zone of Al Mawasi, on the coast and where the Palestinian Red Crescent reported this Friday the death of 25 people in an Israeli bombardment against tents of the displaced. The Israeli army says it is checking it.
In a statement released by Hamas, the mayor of Rafah, Ahmed al Sofi, has assured that the entire city, where no medical center operates, is already the scene of Israeli military operations and that the displaced families who have remained “lack their minimum daily needs for food and drink.
Rafah is where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu places the step from symbolic defeat to “total victory,” for housing the tunnels that connect with Egypt (the army claims to have found 25) and the last four Hamas battalions standing. . The Armed Forces are bombing the area by land, sea and air, with greater intensity since Wednesday and generating thousands more displaced people.
One of the Gazans still there, Hatem, 45, described last night as “one of the worst” in the west of the city, with bombing from drones, fighter-bombers, warships and tanks. “They are receiving hard blows from the resistance fighters [milicianos], which must be holding them back,” he told the Reuters agency. Gazan health authorities have reported 32 deaths during the day in Rafah. There are already tanks along the entire Philadelphia corridor (the border with Egypt), as well as the east, center and south of the city.
One month
Join Morning Express to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
“I estimate that for [alcanzar] our next objective, which is to finish [las zonas de] Shabura and Tel al Sultan, which we want to completely demolish, will take about a month, at this level of intensity,” Colonel Liron Betito, of the Givati Infantry Brigade, told Israeli military correspondents brought to Rafah by the army. , which did not invite foreign media and prevents the press from free access to Gaza. Israel claims to have killed 550 militants in the six weeks of clashes in Rafah, in which it has lost 22 soldiers, almost half last Sunday, its deadliest day in half a year. The Ministry of Health of the Hamas Government in Gaza, which does not specify whether the dead are civilians or militiamen, has been reporting dozens of Palestinian deaths every day in different parts of Gaza. The majority are minors or women and there are more than 37,000 so far in the war, which has already lasted more than eight months.
Although the focus is on Rafah, the Israeli bombings also extend to central and northern Gaza. The City Council of the capital, where tens of thousands of people remain and less than half of the properties are habitable, reported this Friday of the death of five employees who operated municipal wells, in a bombing of a garage that belonged to the council. . They were between 24 and 54 years old.
Follow all the international information onFacebook andxor inour weekly newsletter.
.
.
_
