The Israeli Defense Forces battled Hamas Saturday in intense fighting in the northern Gaza town of Jabalia – which is also the site of the area’s largest refugee camp.
Thick smoke hung over the town as residents complained of near-constant aerial bombardments and shelling from Israeli tanks.
The assault came after Israel’s chief military spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Friday that the IDF had achieved nearly “full operational control” of northern Gaza.
On Saturday, Hagari said that the IDF was continuing to expand its operations in southern Gaza, the Times of Israel reported.
“Upon their entry into new Hamas strongholds, troops are engaged in heavy battles,” Hagari said.
The IDF is still fighting “very heavily” in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, he added.
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2005: Israel unilaterally withdraws from the Gaza Strip more than three decades after winning the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War.
2006: Terrorist group Hamas wins a Palestinian legislative election.
2007: Hamas seizes control of Gaza in a civil war.
2008: Israel launches military offensive against Gaza after Palestinian terrorists fired rockets into the town of Sderot.
2023: Hamas launches the biggest attack on Israel in 50 years, in an early-morning ambush Oct. 7, firing thousands of rockets and sending dozens of militants into Israeli towns.
Terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israelis, wounded more than 4,200, and took at least 200 hostage.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to announce, “We are at war,” and vowed Hamas would pay “a price it has never known.”
The Gaza Health Ministry — which is controlled by Hamas — reported at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,500 injured since the war began.
Both Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and war cabinet member Benny Gantz toured northern Gaza Saturday – and vowed that the southern cities would meet the same fate, the Times of Israel said.
“I am sure that [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is sitting in his bunker watching TV, he sees what Beit Hanoun looks like,” Gallant said in a video statement.
“This is also true for the Hamas commander who is now fighting against our forces in Khan Younis, he understands how the story ended for the Beit Hanoun battalion,” he added.
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Israel’s Gaza campaign should also serve as a warning to Hezbollah, which continues to attack Israel from Lebanon to the north.
Also this weekend, the IDF confirmed that five soldiers were killed in the most recent fighting in Gaza – including two staff sergeants from the GIvati Brigade’s reconnaissance unit.
The new deaths bring the total ground operation fatalities to 144, the Times of Israel said.
Earlier this week, the United Nations and other agencies issued a dire warning that over 500,000 Gazan civilians – about a quarter of the population – are starving as a result of the war.
The crisis has surpassed the near-famines in Yemen and Afghanistan in recent years, the report claimed.
The risk of a famine in Gaza is “increasing each day” as insufficient aid is entering the embattled area, it stated.
“It doesn’t get any worse. I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed,” said Arif Husain, chief economist of the UN World Food Program.
“These entirely manmade, foreseeable, and preventable catastrophic conditions mean that children and families in the Gaza Strip are now facing violence from the air, and deprivation from the ground—with potentially the worst yet to come,” UNICEF wrote in its own damning assessment of the situation.
Meanwhile, doctors at a field hospital in central Gaza say they are left with dwindling amounts of gauze and iodine as the struggle to keep up with the influx on injured patients.
“We change their dressings one day and the next we find infection because there is no sterilization, there are no specialized places. There are no bin bags,” surgeon Bashir al-Hourani told Reuters of his struggle to keep the adults and children healthy.
With Post wires