Israel tells innocents to leave as Rafah hit
RAFAH: Israel has continued pounding parts of Gaza, including Rafah where it told more people to evacuate as it appears to plan further attacks on the southern city.
Witnesses reported intense air strikes in Rafah, near the border crossing with Egypt, and images showed smoke rising over the city on Saturday.
The Israeli army said troops were fighting “armed terrorists” at the crossing and had found “numerous underground tunnel shafts”.
Hamas said Israel was “expanding the incursion into Rafah to include new areas in the centre and the west of the city”. The new evacuation order for eastern Rafah, posted on X by Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee, said the designated areas had “witnessed Hamas terrorist activities”.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari later said “we have eliminated dozens of terrorists in eastern Rafah”.
Israel on Saturday said 300,000 people had fled Rafah since an initial evacuation order, as more residents piled water tanks, mattresses and other belongings onto vehicles and prepared to flee again. “We don’t know where to go,” said Farid Abu Eida, who was preparing to leave Rafah, having already been displaced there from Gaza City.
“There is no place left in Gaza that is safe or not overcrowded.”
The evacuation order on Saturday told residents to go to the “humanitarian zone” of Al-Mawasi, on the coast northwest of Rafah.
That area has “extremely limited access to clean drinking water, latrines” and other basic services, said Sylvain Groulx, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) emergency co-ordinator in Gaza.
EU chief Charles Michel said on social media that Rafah civilians were being ordered to “unsafe zones”, denouncing it as “unacceptable”.
Other strikes occurred in north Gaza, witnesses said. At least 21 people were killed during strikes in central Gaza and taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah city, a hospital statement said.
Bodies covered in white dust lay on the ground in a courtyard of the facility. A man in a baseball cap leaned over one body bag, clasping a dust-covered hand.
The feet of another corpse poked from under a blanket bearing the picture of a large teddy bear.
While mediation efforts towards a truce and hostage release appeared to stall, Hamas said one of the hostages it had held captive since kidnapping him from Israel on October 7, who appeared in a video it released on Saturday, had died from wounds suffered in an Israeli strike.
The Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said Nadav Popplewell, a British-Israeli man, had been wounded in a strike a month ago and died “because he did not receive intensive medical care because the enemy has destroyed the Gaza Strip’s hospitals”.
US President Joe Biden on Saturday said a ceasefire would be achieved “tomorrow” if Hamas released the hostages.
On Friday the White House said it did not yet see a “major ground operation” in Rafah.