Israel confirms its forces are in central Rafah in expanding offensive in southern Gaza city

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The Israeli military confirmed Friday that its forces are operating in central parts of Rafah in its expanding offensive in the southern Gaza city.

Israel launched its ground assault into the city on May 6, triggering an exodus of around one million Palestinians out of the city and throwing U.N. humanitarian operations based in the area into turmoil. Still, U.S. President Joe Biden has said Israel has not crossed the “red lines” of a full-fledged invasion that he has urged them against.

Friday’s statement by the Israeli military suggested its forces have been operating in most parts of the city. For its first weeks, the Israeli assault focused on Rafah’s eastern districts and in areas close to the border with Egypt. Israeli troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt on the first day of the offensive and have since claimed control over the Philadelphi Corridor, a road running the length of the Gaza-Egypt border on the Gazan side.

Earlier this week, Israeli troops also moved into Rafah’s western district of Tel al-Sultan, where heavy clashes with Hamas fighters have been reported by witnesses.

In its statement Friday, the military said its troops in central Rafah had uncovered Hamas rocket launchers and tunnels and dismantled a weapons storage city of the group. It did not specify where in central Rafah the operations were taking place, but previous statements and witness reports have pointed to raids in the Shaboura refugee camp and other sites near the city center.

Israel has said an offensive in Rafah is vital to uprooting Hamas fighters in its military’s campaign to destroy the group after its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel.

Israeli forces have ended operations in north Gaza’s Jabalia area after days of intense fighting and over 200 air strikes.

In a statement on more than two weeks of fierce fighting in Jabalia, the Israeli military said troops had completed their operation and withdrawn to prepare for other operations in Gaza.

During the operation, troops recovered the bodies of seven of the 250 hostages Hamas-led militants abducted when they stormed over the border into Israel on Oct. 7 last year and killed around 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, at least 36,284 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and land war in Gaza, its health ministry said in an update on Friday, and much of the densely populated enclave lies in ruins.

Israel will not agree to any halt in fighting that is not part of a deal that includes the return of surviving hostages, a senior Israeli security official said on Friday. Hamas had said on Thursday that it would be ready for an accord, including an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, as long as the Israelis stopped the war.

In Jabalia, a crowded urban district populated by refugees from the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and their descendants, Hamas turned the “civilian area into a fortified combat compound”, the Israeli military statement said.

It said Israeli troops killed hundreds of militants in close-quarter combat and seized large caches of weaponry and destroyed rocket launchers primed for use.

Underground, Israel forces disabled a weapons-filled tunnel network extending over 10 km and killed Hamas’ district battalion commander, it said.

Israel has blamed what it calls Hamas’ deliberate embedding of fighters in residential areas for the high civilian toll in the war. Hamas has denied using civilians as cover for fighters.

Jabalia has been battered by intense combat for weeks, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas units.

There were weeks of heavy fighting in Jabalia in the early stages of the Israeli campaign and in January, the military said it had killed all the Hamas commanders and eliminated the combat formations of Gaza’s ruling group in the area.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to eradicate Hamas as a fighting and political force has run up against the Islamist group’s deep roots in Gaza’s social fabric.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israel on Wednesday to come up with a post-war plan for Gaza, warning that without one, further military gains might not be durable, and lawlessness, chaos and a Hamas comeback could ensue.

As the war has dragged on and Gaza’s infrastructure has been widely demolished, malnutrition has spread among the 2.3 million population as aid deliveries have slowed to a trickle, and the United Nations has warned of incipient famine.

Jordan will host an emergency international conference on June 11 to work on the humanitarian response to the war, in coordination with Egypt and the United Nations, Amman’s royal court said on Friday.

Israeli tanks rumbled into Rafah’s city centre on Tuesday as part of a series of probing operations around the area that has become one of the main focal points of the war in Gaza.

The army said it had come across longer-range rockets as well as stocks of rocket-propelled grenades, explosives and ammunition as it continued “intelligence-based operational activities” in Rafah, which skirts Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Hamas fighters demonstrated their continuing strength in Rafah last week, launching missiles at Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv for the first time in months on Sunday.

Israel has signalled for weeks that it intended to mount an assault on the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah, drawing international condemnation and warnings even from allies like the United States not to attack the city while it remained full of displaced people.

The risks were underlined on Sunday when an Israeli airstrike targeting two Hamas commanders outside the city set off a blaze that killed at least 45 people sheltering in tents next to the compound hit by the jets.