Palestinians brace for Rafah assault as Israel promises evacuation plan By Reuters

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Henriette Chacar

DOHA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israeli air strikes killed 17 people in Rafah on the Gaza border overnight, medics said on Saturday, as over a million Palestinians crammed into the city await a full-scale offensive with the rest of the enclave in ruins and nowhere left to run.

Four months into the war in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said it has ordered the military to develop a plan to evacuate Rafah and destroy four Hamas battalions it says are deployed there.

The Israeli military said the air force killed two Hamas operatives in Rafah on Saturday.

In previous Israeli assaults on Gaza’s cities the military ordered civilians to flee south, but there is no obvious place for them to go and aid agencies have said large numbers could die.

“Any Israeli incursion in Rafah means massacres, means destruction. People are filling every inch of the city and we have nowhere to go,” said Rezik Salah, 35, who fled his Gaza City home with his wife and two children for Rafah early in the war.

The conflict in Gaza began on Oct. 7 when Hamas gunmen stormed border defences to attack Israeli towns, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and dragging around 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel responded with a massive bombardment and ground offensive in which about 28,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed, according to medical authorities in Hamas-run Gaza.

The conflict has threatened to spread across the Middle East, with Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah regularly trading fire, and flare-ups in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

In Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthi militia held a funeral on Saturday for at least 17 militants killed during joint U.S.-British airstrikes, the Houthi-run Saba news agency said.

The Houthis have used drones to attack merchant ships since Nov. 19 in what they say is a response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza, prompting Britain and the United States to start retaliatory strikes last month.

The U.S. Central Command said its forces conducted self-defence strikes against Houthi missiles and drones on Saturday.

In Lebanon, an Israeli strike targeted a Palestinian figure close to Hamas, security sources said. The target survived but three others were killed, including a member of Hezbollah.

Much of Gaza has meanwhile been reduced to rubble, with Israeli forces destroying swathes of towns with airstrikes, artillery fire and controlled detonations, leaving more than 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants homeless.

Most of the displaced have sought shelter in Rafah, in the far south on the border with Egypt, but after ceasefire talks failed, Netanyahu this week said Israeli forces would fight on until “total victory”, including in Rafah.

On Friday night an airstrike on one Rafah house killed 11 people and wounded dozens more, while a second strike killed six people in another house, medical officials said. Earlier on Saturday two separate Israeli airstrikes killed five members of the Hamas-run police force in Rafah, including a senior officer, Hamas and medics said.

In the other main southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where many displaced people initially fled before an Israeli offensive there last month, the Palestinian Health Ministry voiced alarm at Israeli operations around the main Nasser Hospital.

The ministry said Israeli forces had surrounded the hospital and were shooting in the vicinity, and it was concerned about 300 medical staff, 450 patients and 10,000 people sheltering there.

Footage circulating on social media, which Reuters could not independently verify, showed tanks at the hospital gates.

Israel’s military said in an update on fighting on Saturday that its forces were continuing intensive activities in Khan Younis as well as northern and central Gaza, killing militants, seizing weapons and striking infrastructure.

It did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the situation at Nasser hospital.

FIERCE FIGHTING

In Gaza City, the first major population centre that Israel’s operation targeted after ground forces invaded in late October, residents reported fierce fighting on Saturday.

Israel said on Saturday its forces had discovered a tunnel network hundreds of metres (yards) long running partly under the Gaza City headquarters of UNRWA, the main relief agency for Palestinians.

The military said it was evidence of how Hamas had exploited UNRWA, which has launched an internal probe and seen some donor countries freeze funding over allegations last month by Israel that some of its staff doubled as Hamas operatives.

UNRWA said its staff left its headquarters in Gaza City on Oct. 12 following Israeli evacuation orders.

“We have not used that compound since we left it nor are we aware of any activity that may have taken place there,” It said.

An Israeli official who declined to be named said Israel would try to organise for people in Rafah to be moved back north ahead of any assault.

Egypt has said it will not allow any mass displacement of Palestinians into its territory. Palestinians fear Israel means to drive them from their homeland then forbid their return.

The continued warfare in Gaza City, long after Israel said it was redeploying some troops to other areas, shows the limitations of any proposal to evacuate displaced people from Rafah to other parts of the enclave.

Palestinian rescue workers in Gaza City said they had found the bodies of a six-year-old girl and her family members, along with the ambulance team sent to rescue them, days after an audio clip of her call to dispatchers begging for help was released.