After weeks of fierce fighting with Hamas in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army is today escalating its operations in southern part of the Palestinian enclaveraising concern about the risk of a “scenario from hell” unfolding for civilians.

Chahal, who has been conducting ground operations in the small coastal strip of Palestinian land since October 27, announced last Sunday that he was expanding operations to “all” of the Gaza Strip, with tanks being deployed near Khan Younis, a new focus of hostilities. . The city of more than 200,000 inhabitants suffered heavy bombing during the night.

The Israeli army ordered, when starting the ground operation, the population of the northern Gaza Strip to leave, to go to the southern part of the enclave. Now this section is even more densely populated, as hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced people took refuge there.

During the night, eyewitnesses reported shelling and heavy fighting near Khan Younis, as well as raids in the direction of Rafah, at the southern end of the enclave. The official Palestinian news agency WAFA, for its part, spoke of “many” dead in Gaza City, further north.

International organizations are sounding the alarm for civilians in Gaza, where “all telecommunications services” were suspended because “the largest fiber optic network on the Israeli side” was damaged, Palestinian telecommunications organization PalTel said.

“It’s heading for an even more hellish scenario where humanitarian operations will not be able to respond” to the needs, Lynn Hastings, the Canadian who has taken on the role of UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian Territories, warned yesterday.

Hastings’ visa will not be renewed by Israeli authorities, who accuse her of not being “impartial”, as they made clear last week.

“Unbearable” suffering

Aid organizations describe the conditions for civilians in the Palestinian enclave of 2.4 million inhabitants as “unbearable”.

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Miriana Spoliaric, who arrived yesterday in the Gaza Strip, spoke of “unbearable” suffering, stressing that what “shocked her the most” are the “children who have horrific injuries and also lost their their parents and nobody deals with them”, while he insisted that the civilians “have nowhere to go”.

According to the UN, 1.8 million people, about three-quarters of the total population of the Palestinian enclave, were forced to leave their homes because of the war.

“We saw what happened in northern Gaza. This cannot be a model for the south,” Ahmed al-Madari, the regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO), emphasized from Cairo.

Empty the warehouses?

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said yesterday that he had received a notice from the Israeli military demanding that we “remove all our supplies from our medical stockpile in the southern Gaza Strip within 24 hours, as ground operations will impossible to use”.

But Israel’s Defense Ministry’s body responsible for overseeing political activities in the Palestinian territories (COGAT) denied that it had demanded that warehouses of WHO medical and pharmaceutical materials be emptied.

However, the Israeli army is asking international humanitarian organizations for their “support” in order to create “infrastructure” in Al Mawasi, a coastal area between Khan Yunis and Rafah, where it recommends that civilians take refuge.

Yesterday he said his forces had acted “with force” in Khan Younis, where he dropped leaflets warning that a “terrible attack is imminent” and demanding that civilians leave.

Dozens of tanks, armored personnel carriers and construction machinery were seen moving towards the city.

In Rafah, a city that neighbors Egypt and has suffered major damage as the Israeli army said it tried to destroy underground Hamas tunnels, survivors searched through the rubble yesterday.

“We were at home, we heard a really loud bang and things started falling on us… it was like an earthquake. We had never experienced anything like this before, the earth was shaking,” said Abu Jahar al-Hajj, a survivor.

One fighter, two civilians

According to the latest figures released by Hamas on Monday, at least 15,899 people, 70% of whom were women, children and teenagers, have been killed since Israeli shelling of the Gaza Strip began on October 7.

For every dead fighter of hers Hamas two civilians were killed in the Gaza Strip, senior Israeli army officers said yesterday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We hope that this ratio will be much lower in the next phase of the war,” said one of them. The Israeli military is using a high-tech mapping system to reduce the civilian death toll, senior officers have said.

In Israel, authorities say around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in an attack by Hamas’ military wing on southern areas of Israel on October 7, while around 240 others were abducted and taken to the small Palestinian enclave.

In retaliation, the Israeli military-political leadership declared war and vowed to “eliminate” Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for more than fifteen years.

The Israeli army announced this morning the deaths of three more of its members the previous day. The official casualty count since the start of his land operation is 78 dead.

According to the same source, 137 hostages remain in the Gaza Strip after 105 were released during the week-long truce — 80 were exchanged for 240 inmates in Israeli prisons, mostly women, children and teenagers.

Efforts to extend the truce failed in part because Hamas did not want women held hostage to reveal what they had suffered, a US official claimed yesterday. The Palestinian Islamist movement denied this theory.

West Bank and Lebanon

Hostilities also continue to unfold in the West Bank, Israel’s border with Lebanon and various other locations in the Middle East, where US troops have been targeted dozens of times in recent weeks.

In the West Bank, five Palestinians were killed yesterday by Israeli army fire, according to the Palestinian Authority. And early today, elements of Chahal were once again deployed in the Jenin sector, a stronghold of Palestinian armed organizations.

In addition, the Israeli air force bombed the positions of Hezbollah of Lebanon, a movement allied with Hamas, and other sectors of Lebanese territory in the early hours of the morning, in “retaliation” for the launching of rockets against northern Israel.

The current escalation on the Israel/Lebanon border is being described as the worst since the 2006 war.