War between Israel and Hamas: dozens of Israeli tanks entered southern Gaza, eyewitnesses say

After last week’s failed truce extension, Israel expanded its offensive into the Gaza Strip, prompting international concern. This Monday, dozens of Israeli tanks, military transports and bulldozers entered the southern Palestinian enclave, near the town of Khan Younes, several witnesses told AFP.

Amin Abu Hola, 59, said the Israeli military vehicles had now penetrated “two kilometers deep” into the village of al-Qarara, northeast of Khan Younes. “The tanks are now on the Salaheddin road,” which runs along the Gaza Strip from north to south, added 34-year-old Moaz Mohammed.

Ground operation “expanding against Hamas”

However, the Israeli army said on Monday it was not seeking to force Palestinians to leave for Egypt, while acknowledging their “difficult” situation in the besieged Gaza Strip. “We are not trying to evacuate people there,” its spokesman Jonathan Conricus told reporters this Monday. “We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and have designated a special humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip,” he said of the coastal region of al-Mawasi.

On Sunday evening, the army that initially entered northern Gaza announced it was “extending the ground operation against Hamas to the entire” Palestinian territory. This is despite pressure from the US, Israel’s historic ally, which has called on Tel Aviv to protect hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced in the enclave’s south. “The army operates wherever there are Hamas strongholds,” army spokesman Daniel Hagari said. Israeli forces said they had carried out “nearly 10,000 airstrikes” in the Gaza Strip since October 7, the date of the historic Hamas attack.

While most hospitals in the north are shut down, those in the south are in chaos, overwhelmed by the number of casualties, without electricity and with fuel supplies to run generators nearly depleted. At Nasser’s hospital in Khan Younes, the largest in southern Gaza, new wounded and new bodies pile up after each explosion, sometimes with no one to identify them.

“I have no words to describe the horrors that befall the children here,” James Elder, a UNICEF representative present at Nasser Hospital, said in a video Sunday. “I see children arriving en masse among the victims,” he said earlier. on. Violence has also increased since the start of the war in the occupied West Bank and on the border between Israel and Lebanon.