Israel sent tanks this Sunday to Djabalia, in the north of the Gaza Strip, after a night of intense air and ground operations which left at least 19 dead and dozens injured, according to health services. Djabalia is the largest of Gaza’s eight refugee camps.
Most of the 100,000 inhabitants are descendants of Palestinians expelled from the towns and villages of what is now Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the year the Jewish state was born. On Saturday evening, the Israeli army said that the forces operating in Djabalia aimed to prevent Hamas from reestablishing its military capabilities there.
“In recent weeks, we have identified attempts by Hamas to rehabilitate its military capabilities in Djabalia. We are operating there to eliminate these attempts,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, Israeli military spokesperson, told the press.
“The war resumes”
According to this officer, Israeli forces operating in the Zeitoun district of Gaza killed around 30 Palestinian militants. “The air and ground bombings have not stopped since yesterday, they are bombing everywhere, including near schools which house people who have lost their homes,” said Saed, 45, a resident of Djabalia. “The war is starting again,” he told Reuters via an app. The new incursion has forced many families to flee.
The army sent tanks to Al-Zeitoun, an eastern suburb of Gaza City, as well as to Al-Sabra, where residents reported heavy shelling that included destroying high-rise apartment buildings.
The IDF claimed to have taken control of most of these areas months ago. In Deir Al-Balah, residents and Hamas media reported the presence of Israeli tanks and bulldozers on the outskirts of the town, sparking a shootout with Hamas fighters.
Two doctors killed
In an airstrike on Saturday evening in Deir Al-Balah, two doctors, a father and his son, were killed, health authorities said.
Hamas’ military wing and Islamic Jihad said their fighters attacked the IDF in several areas of Gaza with anti-tank rockets and mortar shells, including in Rafah, where more than a million people have taken refuge.
This Sunday, thousands of families again left Rafah, where the Israeli army issued evacuation orders for certain neighborhoods in the center of the city on the border with Egypt.
“Leaving Rafah, I passed through Khan Younes, I cried, I didn’t know if I was crying because of what I was going through, the humiliation and the feeling of loss that I felt or because of what I saw,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza resident displaced to Rafah. “I saw a ghost town, all the buildings on both sides of the road, entire neighborhoods were wiped out. People are fleeing to safety, knowing that there is no safe place, and that there is no tent and no one to look after them,” he told Reuters.
For Burai, a Palestinian businessman, Palestinians have been abandoned by the world and left to fend for themselves as the war enters its eighth month. “No ceasefire, no UN decision, no hope,” he said.
The war was sparked by a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israel.
The Israeli military operation in Gaza left nearly 35,000 Palestinian dead, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The bombings devastated the coastal enclave and caused a serious humanitarian crisis.