Israel troop mobilisation and pitching of refuge tents signal assault on Rafah
Israel appears to be readying to send troops into Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the only corner of the strip that has not seen fierce ground fighting and where more than half of the Palestinian territory’s population of 2.3 million has sought shelter.
The Israeli military said yesterday that two reservist brigades had been mobilised for missions in Gaza, while video that circulated online appeared to show rows of square white tents going up in Khan Younis, 3 miles north of Rafah, which was decimated in a months-long Israeli air and ground campaign.
The apparent mobilisation came as Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, released a video of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old IsraeliAmerican who was abducted from the Nova festival during the group’s attack on Israel 7 October.
Goldberg-Polin, who is missing his left arm below the elbow, said in the propaganda video that 70 hostages had been killed in Israeli bombings, and asked the Israeli government to bring surviving hostages home. The video is not dated, but it appeared to have been filmed in the last few days as Goldberg-Polin said he been held captive for “nearly 200 days”.
Israeli officials have estimated that 129 of the roughly 250 people abducted on 7 October remain in Gaza, including 34 who the military has said are dead.
Israel said that Hamas’s leadership, along with four battalions of fighters, were camped out in Rafah, using Israeli hostages as human shields, and that a ground operation was necessary for both “total victory” over the Palestinian militant group and to bring the hostages home.
But the long-threatened plan to attack Rafah has drawn intense opposition from Israel’s allies, including the US, which said it will cause thousands of civilian casualties and further disrupt aid deliveries.
Any major ground operation in Rafah would almost certainly need to be coordinated with Washington and Cairo, given the town’s location on the Egyptian border.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said last week it was acquiring 40,000 tents to prepare for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians, and there were unconfirmed reports that extra artillery and armoured personnel carriers had been deployed to the Gaza Strip periphery.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his war cabinet are expected to meet in the next two weeks to authorise civilian evacuations as the first stage of the Rafah offensive, Israeli media outlets said.
Ceasefire talks mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar have all but collapsed as Israel and Hamas have been unable to agree on the conditions and length of a truce and the identities and numbers of Israeli hostages to be released in exchange for freeing Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
Also yesterday Germany said it would restore cooperation and funding to Unrwa operations in Gaza after an independent review said Israel had not provided evidence to back up claims that hundreds of employees of the UN agency for Palestinians were members of terrorist organisations.
Berlin’s foreign and development ministries said in a joint statement that following Monday’s
‘The Colonna review of Unrwa is an effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on’ Oren Marmorstein
publication of the review, conducted by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, the German government would soon resume cooperation with the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees.
Germany’s decision follows those made by several other major donors, including Australia, Canada, Sweden and Japan, to restore ties with Unwra after the Israeli government claimed in January that members of the agency had been involved in planning and carrying out the Hamas attack of 7 October.
The absence so far of evidence presented to underpin Israel’s allegations has raised questions about the snap decision by 19 donor governments to cut millions of dollars of funding to Unrwa.
In the UK, ministers have said they would await the Colonna review to make a decision on resuming funding: the UK provided £35m last financial year to Unrwa, including £16m extra for humanitarian aid. The US provided £340m to the agency in 2023, but further financial support was blocked by Congress in the wake of Israel’s allegations.
In response to Monday’s publication, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, said the Colonna review was insufficient and an “effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on”.