Israel says it is engaged in the heaviest fighting yet in Gaza : NPR

TEL AVIV, Israel — Some of the heaviest fighting since the start of Israel’s air-and-ground assault on Gaza more than two months ago was taking place Wednesday in Khan Younis, with artillery shelling and gunfire echoing through the Palestinian territory’s second-largest city.

But combat operations were also continuing in Gaza’s north, the focus of Israel’s first phase of the war that Israel says is aimed at crushing Hamas.

“We are in the heart of Jabaliya, in the heart of Shujaiya, and now also in the heart of Khan Younis,” the head of Israel’s Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman said at a news briefing on Tuesday. Jabaliya, the site of a major refugee camp, and Shujaiya, are located in Gaza’s north. Khan Younis, considered a Hamas stronghold, is located toward the south end of the Strip.

In Khan Younis, the reputed home of the Islamist militant group’s top leader, Sinwar, Finkelman said senior Hamas leaders were being “eliminated.”

He said the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday were taking part “in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation, in terms of terrorists killed, the number of firefights, and the use of firepower from the land and air.”

He said Israeli soldiers were “destroying weaponry and terrorist infrastructure, both above and below ground.”

The statement marked the first time that Israel had acknowledged that ground forces were engaged in and around Khan Younis. Israel released video it said showed soldiers operating in northern Gaza.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the IDF said on Wednesday that Israel’s air force had hit 250 targets in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, and that ground troops “continue to locate and destroy weapons, underground shafts, explosive charges and other terrorist infrastructures.”

The fighting, which Israel says is aimed at crushing Hamas, has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians to flee or risk death. They are warned by Israel’s military, using robocalls, online maps and leaflets dropped by airplanes, to move to “safer zones.” The areas considered relatively free from fighting include a tiny sliver of coastal land known as Al Mawasi, and the Rafah area along the Egyptian border.

UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency that aids Palestinians, issued yet another in a long series of dire warnings in recent days. It warned of “[another] wave of displacement” in Gaza.

“[T]he situation is getting worse each minute. There is no ‘safe’ zone, the entire Gaza Strip has become one of the most dangerous places in the world. There is nowhere to go as shelters, including UNRWA are overflowing,” the agency said on X.

The United Nations has estimated that 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been internally displaced by the fighting since Oct. 7, when Hamas carried out a surprise attack on communities in southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking around 240 hostages, Israel says. In response, Israel launched airstrikes and in the following weeks, a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza.

More than 15,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the fighting began, according to Gaza health officials, and nearly three-quarters of the population made homeless. International pressure from the death and suffering inflicted on Gazans has brought pressure on Israel to protect Palestinian civilians.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gave a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, warning that Israel risks “strategic defeat” if it doesn’t protect Palestinians in Gaza.

“The center of gravity is the civilian population and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat,” Austin said.

Israel’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said Tuesday that, “We act professionally [and] evacuate the population ahead of time from the battle zones.”

“We are asked a lot about the destruction in Gaza,” Halevi said. “Hamas is the [answer] to those questions,” adding, “Our forces find weapons in almost every house, terrorists are found in many houses, we fight them.”

“These things require the use of a wide range of fire, both to damage the enemy and, of course, to protect our forces. That is why they operate powerfully” while still going to “great efforts to minimize harm” to civilians, Halevi said.

Speaking to NPR, Brian Carter, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Critical Threats Project, which has been tracking the urban fighting in Gaza, tells NPR that Israeli forces have not been making fast progress on the ground.

“Clearing operations take a very long time,” Carter said. “In areas they have already cleared they still have to conduct military operations as Hamas fighters attack their positions in these cleared areas.”

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ministers of his war cabinet met with some hostages released in a brief cease-fire last month after being held for weeks in Gaza by Hamas.

Released hostages castigated the Israeli government officials for claiming to have intelligence on Hamas locations yet bombing indiscriminately. They said during captivity they were more afraid of Israeli bombs than their militant captors.

One of the former hostages berated officials over reports that Israel was considering flooding Hamas tunnels, where many of the captives have been held.

NPR’s Scott Neuman and Eleanor Beardsley reported from Tel Aviv and Brian Mann from Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. NPR producer Anas Baba contributed from Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.