Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip on Monday, closing in on the besieged Palestinian territory’s main city as their retaliatory ground offensive against Hamas rumbled violently through a fourth consecutive day.
Fears of a widening regional conflict continue to grow, with Israeli forces also carrying out airstrikes against military infrastructure in Syria Monday after rockets from there fell in open Israeli territory. There were also fresh flare-ups between Israeli troops and Hezbollah operatives on the border with Lebanon.
But the brunt of the war is in Gaza, where United Nations officials and local medical personnel warned Monday that Israeli airstrikes were hitting close to hospitals in and around Gaza City. Thousands of Palestinians are seeking shelter among the wounded in hospitals, as well as in badly overcrowded schools across Gaza.
Israeli officials say their focus is on killing Hamas fighters and destroying the group’s infrastructure in Gaza, but warn the militants have repeatedly employed “human shields” — hiding and operating among civilians in a manner that increases the risk of civilian casualties.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a media briefing Monday vowed there would be no let-up in the Israeli offensive, brushing off calls to delay or scrub the operation to protect millions of Palestinian civilians still trapped inside Gaza.
“Calls for a cease-fire are a call for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen,” Mr. Netanyahu said, speaking in English. “The Bible says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war.”
SEE ALSO: Israeli troops kill ‘dozens’ of Hamas terrorists as fighting ramps up Gaza: IDF spokesman
Israeli officials cited progress in the Gaza ground campaign on Monday. The leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said soldiers had killed “dozens” of Hamas militants, both with precision airstrikes and through pitched gun battles with fighters barricaded inside buildings near the route of the widening armored advance.
“IDF soldiers in the Gaza Strip identified armed terrorists and an anti-tank that was about to be launched in the area of the [Al-Azhar University-Gaza] in the Gaza Strip and directed a fighter jet that attacked them,” the IDF said in a statement Monday.
“In the last day, about 600 targets were attacked, including warehouses, hiding places and gatherings of Hamas operatives and anti-tank positions,” the IDF said in a sobering assessment of the ground campaign in response to Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 assault that killed 1,400 Israelis and captured well over 200 others.
Israeli officials say they have identified 230 people kidnapped by Hamas who are still being held in Gaza. The number continues to grow every day as Israel identifies missing people. Hamas is believed to have released just four hostages since Oct. 7, two American women and two elderly Israeli women. Israeli officials said their troops rescued a fifth hostage Monday — a young female Israeli soldier who had been held by Hamas in Gaza.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said Monday that additional infantry, armored, engineering and artillery units were moving into Gaza and that the ground operation would continue to “expand and intensify.”
U.N. and Palestinian sources in Gaza describe a spiraling humanitarian disaster. The death toll among Palestinians has passed 8,300, mostly women and children, the Gaza Health Ministry said Monday. The figure is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Some 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals —mostly civilians — were killed in the original Hamas rampage in October that sparked the latest round of fighting.
More than 1.4 million people in Gaza have fled their homes. Conditions for civilians are continually deteriorating as food, medicine and fuel run dangerously low. On Sunday, the largest convoy of humanitarian aid yet — 33 trucks — entered from Egypt. Relief workers say the amount is still far less than what is needed for the population of 2.3 million people.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, says nearly 672,000 Palestinians are sheltering in its schools and other facilities across Gaza, which have reached four times their capacity. And crowded hospitals in northern Gaza are under growing threat.
Strikes hit near Gaza City’s Shifa and Al Quds hospitals and the Indonesian and Turkish hospitals in northern Gaza in recent days, the U.N. and residents said Monday, according to The Associated Press. All 10 hospitals operating in northern Gaza have received evacuation orders, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. But local staff have refused to leave, saying an evacuation would amount to a death sentence for patients on ventilators.
Two sides of a war
Israel Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant met on Sunday with families of Israelis who are being held captive by Hamas in Gaza. “It was important for me to meet and hear from you,” he said, adding that “returning the hostages and tracking missing Israelis is a mission of utmost importance.”
The defense minister said that the current offensive on the ground is linked to efforts to return the hostages. “You have all seen who Hamas is — there is nothing more important than returning the hostages and eradicating Hamas,” he said.
Despite claiming progress in its ground operations against Hamas, the Israeli military remained vague about its specific operations inside Gaza, including the location and number of troops. But the movements of recent days, including stepped-up ground operations both north and east of Gaza City, combined with calls for residents to head south, point to a focus on the city.
Israel says much of Hamas’ forces and militant infrastructure, including hundreds of miles of tunnels, are in Gaza City, which before the war was home to over 650,000 people, a population comparable to that of Washington, D.C.
Hamas militants have continued to fire rockets into Israel during recent days, including toward the Israeli commercial hub of Tel Aviv. Roughly 250,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes because of violence along the border with Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon, according to the Israeli military.
In the city of Sderot, which borders Gaza, the once-bustling streets are now silent. The city of 30,000 has suffered from Hamas rocket fire for decades. It was always resilient and in recent years new apartment buildings and playgrounds mushroomed in the city.
But Oct. 7 marked something new for Sderot residents: Terrorists entered the city in white pickup trucks, massacred people at bus stops, gunned down drivers and attacked the police station. The result: a city is almost deserted.
On a recent night, one lone man sat on the roof of a house overlooking Gaza. Nearby soldiers patrolled several small hillocks. New buildings under construction, the cement freshly poured, sat empty, dark and ghostly. In the distance lay Gaza, just a mile away.
The buzzing of drones could be heard overhead. Above the clanging of armored vehicles churning up sand, dust from the movement clogged the air. And in the distance, the endless reverberations of artillery fire and airstrikes pounded the ground. Flashes of light, several miles away, burst, illuminating the clouds.
Fears of a regional conflict
The Biden administration continued to walk a tightrope Monday, expressing full-throated support for Israel — America’s closest ally in the Middle East — while simultaneously pressing the Israelis to act with enough restraint to minimize civilian suffering and prevent the war from spreading.
Monday’s developments came a day after President Biden told Mr. Netanyahu via telephone that Israeli forces inside Gaza should act within “international humanitarian law that prioritizes the protection of civilians,” according to a White House readout of the call.
But White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. stands firmly with Mr. Netanyahu in rejecting international calls for a Gaza cease-fire so long as Hamas remained unbroken and in control of the Palestinian enclave.
“We believe that a cease-fire right now benefits Hamas, and Hamas is the only one that would gain from that right now,” Mr. Kirby told a White House briefing Monday.
Even as Israel continues to send tanks into Gaza, fighting continues in the northern part of the country. Iran-backed Hezbollah militants opened fire at an IDF post on the Lebanese border overnight Sunday. There were no reported injuries. IDF troops responded with artillery fire that destroyed a building used by Hezbollah leadership, officials said.
There was also fresh violence in the West Bank, where Israel said its warplanes carried out airstrikes Monday against militants clashing with its forces in the Jenin refugee camp, the scene of repeated Israeli raids. Hamas said four of its fighters were killed there.
The U.N. special envoy for Syria, meanwhile, warned the Israeli-Hamas conflict has spilled into the country, saying Syria is now “at its most dangerous situation for a long time,” fueled by growing instability and the lack of a political solution in its own 12-year civil war.
Geir Pedersen told the U.N. Security Council Monday he was “sounding an alarm” that the Syrian people now face “a terrifying prospect of a potential wider escalation.”
Mr. Pedersen’s warning came as Pentagon officials warned that Iran-backed militias have attacked U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria at least 23 times since Hamas launched its rampage against Israel from Gaza.
There are roughly 900 U.S. forces in Syria deployed to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State terror group. A senior Defense Department official said the nine strikes targeting the Americans between Oct. 17-30 featured a mix of rockets and one-way attack drones.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Monday vowed that the United States will continue to respond to attacks on U.S. personnel and facilities in Syria “or against U.S. interests.” She also accused “terrorist groups,” some backed by Syria and Iran, of threatening to expand the Gaza conflict “by using Syrian territory to plot and launch attacks against Israel.”
• Staff writer Mike Glenn and special correspondent Seth Frantzman contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports. Mr. Frantzman reported from the Israeli city of Sderot.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.