Backed by the air force, Israeli troops on Friday launched operations against the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza City, forcing tens of thousands of civilians to flee once again, amid the ninth month of a war that always raises the risk of a regional flare-up. .

The Israeli military began an operation in Sujaya on Thursday, initially with artillery fire and attack helicopters. He spoke of the “presence of terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure”. Soldiers moved in and the air force targeted “dozens of facilities” belonging to Hamas.

Columns of thick smoke rose into the sky in Sujaya following airstrikes and artillery shelling, an AFP correspondent found.

Palestinian civil protection and eyewitnesses reported “numerous dead”.

“Tens of thousands of civilians” left the sector, the civil protection stressed. It was preceded by an order from the Israeli army for civilians to be hastily removed from the sector.

“Arrives! We’ve lost our children, we’ve lost our homes, we’re still running from one place to another,” Palestine erupted as she left.

“I saw a chariot in front of the mosque in Suhada pouring. My parents and sister were trapped in the house and I haven’t heard from them. Martyrs are lying in the streets,” said Abdelkarim al-Mamluk, a resident of Gaza.

Israeli shelling also hit other areas in the northern Gaza Strip, “eliminating dozens of terrorists hiding inside UNRWA schools,” the Israeli military said, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

In the central part of the Gaza Strip, medical sources reported three deaths, including a little girl, in Deir al-Bala, and artillery fire in Nuseirat. In the south, artillery fire was reported in Khan Yunis and Rafah.

Mohammad al-Mugair, a civil protection official, told AFP that Israeli forces had advanced into the western part of Rafah and had targeted the headquarters of his agency.

“We were targeted, (Israeli fire) damaged two fire engines, an ambulance and a small excavator that we were using to pull injured people out of the rubble,” he said, adding that his colleagues were injured.

On May 7, the Israeli armed forces launched a ground attack on Rafah, which they presented at the time as the last major stronghold of Hamas. But fighting is reoccurring in many other areas, especially in the north.

Israel’s wide-scale operations in the Gaza Strip were launched in retaliation for an unprecedented raid by Hamas’ military arm on October 7, which left 1,195 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on in official Israeli data.

During this raid, 251 people were kidnapped, of whom 116 remain hostages in the Gaza Strip, but 42 are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

Israel’s political and military leadership has vowed to wipe out the Palestinian Islamist movement, in power in the Palestinian enclave since 2007, which the US and EU designate as a terrorist organization.

Operations in the Gaza Strip have so far claimed the lives of at least 37,765 people, the majority of them civilians, according to data from the Gaza Strip Ministry of Health.

The war has wreaked humanitarian havoc on the small, densely populated enclave of 2.4 million people, under Israeli siege since October 9. Water and food are not enough and health services are on their knees.

32 of the 36 hospitals measured by the Gaza Strip have been damaged, some repeatedly, since October 7 and 20 are out of order, according to data released yesterday by the World Health Organization.

UNRWA official Louise Wateridge yesterday described living conditions in the enclave as “disastrous”.

People are living in the rubble of buildings or in tents around giant piles of rubble, he explained to the press in Geneva via video link from the central Gaza Strip.

“There is no water, no sanitation, no food,” she added, specifically referring to Han Younis.

At the same time, the concern that the war will spread to Lebanon remains.

From the day after the outbreak of the war, the powerful Lebanese movement Hezbollah opened a front with the Israeli army, supporting Hamas, and since then the exchanges of fire on the borders of the two countries are practically daily and sometimes extremely intense.

Hezbollah said yesterday it had targeted Israeli military positions in border areas and announced the death of one more of its fighters in Israeli shelling.

The Lebanese official news agency, for its part, spoke of three dead, including two Palestinians, in an Israeli bombardment in the village of Kfar Kila.

In northern Israel, air defense sirens sounded repeatedly warning of rocket attacks, according to the Israeli military; the same source later said three drones had been launched from Lebanon and landed in the Galilee, causing no casualties, it said.