IDF press on in Gaza after aerial attack
GAZA: Israel launched dozens of air strikes on Gaza overnight, Hamas said yesterday, as the army said it will not be distracted from the war after Iran’s unprecedented attack heightened fears of wider conflict.
World powers have urged restraint after Iran late Saturday launched more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, though the Israeli military has said the vast majority were intercepted.
Tehran’s first direct assault on Israel, in retaliation for a deadly strike in Damascus earlier this month, followed months of violence across the region involving Iranian proxies who say they act in support of Palestinians in the war-battered Gaza Strip.
“Even while under attack from Iran, we have not lost sight, not for one moment, of our critical mission in Gaza to rescue our hostages from the hands of Iran’s proxy Hamas,” Israeli military spokesman R Adm Daniel Hagari said late on Sunday.
As mediators eye a deal to halt the fighting, triggered by Hamas’ Oct 7 attack, fears grew over Israeli plans to send troops into Rafah, a far-southern city where the majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have taken refuge.
“Hamas is still holding our hostages in Gaza,” R Adm Hagari said of the roughly 130 people, including 34 presumed dead, who Israel says remain in the hands of Palestinian militants since the Hamas attack.
“We also have hostages in Rafah, and we will do everything we can to bring them back home,” the military spokesman told a briefing.
The army said it was “calling up approximately two reserve brigades for operational activities on the Gazan front”, about a week after withdrawing most ground troops from the territory.
The Hamas government media office said Israeli aircraft launched “dozens” of strikes overnight on central Gaza.
Rumours of a reopened Israeli checkpoint on the coastal road from the besieged territory’s south to Gaza City sent thousands of Palestinians heading north on Sunday, despite Israel denying it was open. An AFP journalist saw mothers holding their children’s hands and families piling onto carts with their luggage as they made the journey.
Hoping to reunite with his wife who has been in the southern city of Khan Yunis, Palestinian man Mahmoud Awdeh said, “she told me over the phone that people are leaving... she’s waiting at the checkpoint until the army agrees to let her head to the north”.
The Israeli army, however, said that reports the route was open were “not true”.