Israeli tanks on outskirts of Gaza City with key road cut
Israeli tanks have reached the outskirts of Gaza City and cut off a road that connects north and south of the territory, signalling a potential effort to surround its main city.
Witnesses said tanks entered the Zaytun district on Monday morning and posted footage of what appeared to be the shelling of a car. “They have cut the Salah al-Din road and are firing at any vehicle that tries to go along it,” said one resident, Agence France-Presse reported.
Hamas fighters were attempting to block the incursion, Hazem Qasem, a Hamas spokesperson, told reporters. “The Palestinian resistance attacked the Israeli tanks in Salah al-Din street.” The area is about 2 miles from the Gaza fence.
The fighting followed another night of heavy bombardment and came two days after Israel expanded ground incursions. Nearly three dozen trucks entered the territory in the south.
The Israel Defence Forces were “gradually moving ahead according to plan”, the IDF’s chief military spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, told a press briefing, adding that the IDF had killed dozens of Hamas militants in overnight clashes and struck more than 600 “terror targets”, including weapons depots and anti-tank missile launching positions, in recent days.
A rocket launched from Gaza hit a factory near the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Footage from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City showed people who had recently died laid on the ground in white shrouds. Some shrouds contained the dismembered remains of several people, Salama Maarouf, the head of the Hamas-run media office, told Al Jazeera.
Dozens of the bodies could not be identified – in some cases because entire families had been killed – and were to be buried in a mass grave, he said. “We do not know their identity on this earth, but they are known in the heavens,” he said.
The bombardment has killed more than 8,300 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. More children have been killed in Gaza in the past three weeks than the total killed in conflicts around the world in every year since 2019, Save the Children said.
Aid agencies said the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continued to worsen with insufficient water, food, medicine and fuel. On a visit on Sunday to Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt – the only entry point for a thin trickle of aid – the international criminal court’s top prosecutor, Karim Khan, said impeding aid could constitute a war crime and urged Israel to allow more trucks to enter.
The conflict began on 7 October when a Hamas onslaught killed more than 1,400 people in southern Israel.
The family of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old German Israeli who was among the people abducted from the Supernova music festival, announced on Monday that she was dead. “Unfortunately we got the news yesterday that my daughter is no longer alive,” her mother, Ricarda, told the German RTL/ntv station. Israel’s foreign ministry said the cause of her death remained unclear.
Violence flared beyond Gaza. An Israeli jet struck what the IDF called a “military infrastructure” target in Syria. In Jerusalem, an assailant stabbed and seriously injured a police officer. Other officers shot and arrested the assailant, said a police statement.
The deepening IDF incursion into Gaza came amid dwindling Israeli public enthusiasm for a prolonged occupation. Support has fallen from 65% on 10 October to 46% now, according to a study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which has monitored the same sample of 1,774 people, with a 4.2% margin of error.
“We see a continuation of the decline in Israeli support for occupying Gaza,” said Nimrod Nir, a researcher at the social science faculty. “The shock we saw in the first week, the rage we saw in the second, are slowly moderated and now Israelis care more about the hostage situation, are less inclined to enter a full-scale occupation.”
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared increasingly beleaguered after trying to deflect blame for the Hamas onslaught. On Sunday he tweeted that his security chiefs had assured him Hamas was contained and had no plans to attack. Hours later he deleted the post and apologised.
The debacle prompted criticism even from allies who said Netanyahu had facilitated Hamas’s grip on Gaza as part of a strategy to divide Palestinians.
“Since coming to power in 2009, Netanyahu has built up Hamas as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority,” wrote Yoav Limor, the military affairs correspondent for Israel Hayom, a normally pro-Netanyahu newspaper. “He was warned countless times that this was a dangerous plan: instead of bolstering the pragmatic elements, he strengthened those that will never recognize Israel’s existence.”
Ben Caspit, a commentator in Ma’ariv, called Netanyahu a “scarecrow that is stuffed with rags playing the role of prime minister” and urged his party, Likud, to remove him. “He is unfit physically, he is unfit mentally, he is unfit morally. He needs to step down, and the sooner the better.”