Israel bombed targets in the overcrowded town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip early this morning after hours earlier US government officials warned Tel Aviv not to expand its ground offensive in that direction, the Associated Press reported.
Rafah is home to more than half of the 2.3 million population of the Israeli-blocked enclave.
Today’s Israeli strikes hit two residential buildings, killing eight Palestinians, including three children and a woman.
A kindergarten used as a shelter for displaced residents in central Gaza was also hit. At least four people were killed in the attack, local hospital officials and AP reporters said. About 30 were injured, mostly women and children. Witnesses say that the people in the shelter were asleep at the time of the Israeli attack.
US President Joe Biden said yesterday that Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack in Gaza was “excessive”. This is the sharpest criticism that the US has so far directed at its close ally, AP commented.
Tel Aviv’s expressed intentions to expand the Israeli ground offensive to Rafah caused a strong public response in Washington.
“We have yet to see any evidence of serious planning for such an operation,” US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said yesterday. Undertaking such an offensive now “without any planning and with little forethought in an area where a million people have taken refuge would be a disaster,” Patel warned.
John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, stressed that Washington “would not support” an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah.
The war has been going on for five months now, and the Israeli army is still concentrated in the town of Khan Younis, north of Rafah. However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said an advance on Rafah will follow, creating panic among the hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Netanyahu’s remarks also caused alarm among Egyptian authorities, who stressed that any ground operation in the Rafah area would undermine the 40-year-old peace treaty between Tel Aviv and Cairo. The Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip is the main entrance for humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave.
At the start of the ground offensive, more than half of Gaza’s residents moved to Rafah in an attempt to escape Israeli strikes, following Israeli orders to evacuate south. Tel Aviv’s rulings in question now cover two-thirds of the enclave’s territory, although some 300,000 Palestinians are still in the northern half of Gaza.
Israel regularly carries out airstrikes even in areas where there are displaced people, with the argument that it is attacking Hamas targets, AP notes. Tel Aviv blamed the casualties on the Palestinian movement, accusing it of operating from civilian areas.
Today, the Palestinian health authorities announced that the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7 is now 27,947, and the wounded – 67,459, Reuters reported. The Palestinians killed by the Israeli army in the last 24 hours are 107, and the wounded – 142.
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