Israel bombed targets in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday and ordered the evacuation of more neighborhoods targeted for attack, driving up the death toll as the United States and others urged the country to provide more protection a day after the ceasefire collapsed to do to the civilian population.
CBS News was told by Israeli officials that the resumption of fighting was due in part to a terrorist attack that killed four people in Jerusalem on Thursday.
The prospect of further ceasefires in Gaza appeared grim as Israel recalled its negotiators and the Hamas deputy leader said that any further exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinians detained by Israel would only come as part of ending the war.
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“We will continue the war until we achieve all of its objectives, and it is impossible to achieve these objectives without the ground operation,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on Saturday evening.
About 200 Palestinians have been killed in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip since fighting resumed on Friday morning, according to the health ministry, despite the US urging ally Israel to do everything it can to protect civilians.
“This will be very important going forward,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday after meeting with Arab foreign ministers in Dubai, concluding his third trip to the Middle East since the start of the war. “This is something we will be looking at very closely.”
Palestinians look at the destruction after the Israeli bombing in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on Friday, December 1, 2023. Mohammed Dahman / AP
Separately, the Health Ministry said the total death toll in Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7 had exceeded 15,200, a significant increase from the previous toll of more than 13,300 on Nov. 20. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, but it said 70% of the dead were women and children. It was said that more than 40,000 people had been injured since the war began.
Israel says it has targeted Hamas operatives, blaming the militants for civilian casualties and accusing them of operating in residential neighborhoods. According to Israel, 77 of its soldiers were killed in the ground offensive in the north of the Gaza Strip. It claims to have killed thousands of militants without providing evidence.
Many of Israel’s attacks on Saturday focused on the Khan Younis area in southern Gaza, where the military said it attacked more than 50 Hamas targets with airstrikes, tank fire and its navy. Israeli forces said they had struck a total of more than 400 targets since fighting resumed in Gaza on Friday.
The military dropped leaflets a day earlier urging residents to leave, but as of late Friday there were no reports that large numbers of people had left the country, according to the United Nations.
“There is nowhere to go,” laments Emad Hajar, who fled the northern city of Beit Lahia with his wife and three children a month ago to seek refuge in Khan Younis.
“They drove us out of the north, and now they’re pushing us to leave the south.”
About two million people – almost the entire population of the Gaza Strip – are crowded into the south of the territory, where Israel pushed people to relocate at the start of the war and has since vowed to expand its ground attacks. Unable to reach northern Gaza or neighboring Egypt, their only escape is to move within the 85-square-mile area.
In response to U.S. calls to protect civilians, the Israeli military released an online map, but it has been more confusing than helpful.
It divides the Gaza Strip into hundreds of numbered, randomly drawn plots, sometimes across streets or blocks, and asks residents to know the number of their location in the event of an eventual evacuation.
The Israeli military released a map of so-called “evacuation zones” in the Gaza Strip on Friday, following international calls for the creation of safe areas where civilians can find shelter from devastating bombardment. OpenStreetMap contributors
“The publication does not specify where people will be evacuated,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Palestinian Territories noted in its daily report. “It is unclear how Gazans would access the map without electricity and amid repeated telecommunications outages.”
In the first use of the map to order evacuations, Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military’s Arabic spokesman, indicated areas in the north and south to be evacuated on Saturday in posts on X, formerly Twitter.
Adraee listed numbered zones under evacuation orders – but the highlighted areas on the maps accompanying his post did not match the numbered zones.
Egypt has expressed concerns that the renewed offensive could lead to Palestinians attempting to invade its territory. In a statement late Friday, Egypt’s foreign ministry said the forced relocation of Palestinians was “a red line.”
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, in Dubai on Saturday for the COP28 climate conference, is expected to make proposals with regional leaders to “center Palestinian voices” to plan the next steps for Gaza after the conflict, it’s called the White House. US President Joe Biden’s administration has stressed the need for an eventual two-state solution with the coexistence of Israel and a Palestinian state.
The renewed hostilities have also raised concerns about 136 hostages who the Israeli military says are still being held by Hamas and other militants, after 105 were released during the ceasefire. For the families of the remaining hostages, the collapse of the ceasefire was a blow to hopes that their loved ones could be next, after days of watching others being released. The Israeli army said Friday it had confirmed the deaths of four more hostages, bringing the known death toll to seven.
What does the end of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas mean for the hostages still held in Gaza?
During the ceasefire, Israel freed 240 Palestinians from its prisons. Most of those released by both sides were women and children.
The war began after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and other militants that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured about 240 people in southern Israel.
After the ceasefire ended, militants in Gaza resumed firing rockets at Israel, and fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah fighters operating along the northern border with Lebanon.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled the northern Gaza Strip to Khan Younis and other parts of the south at the start of the war. This was part of an extraordinary mass exodus that has left three-quarters of the population displaced and facing widespread shortages of food, water and other supplies.
Israel’s “Iron Dome” air defense system fires to intercept a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, Israel, Friday, December 1, 2023. Tsafrir Abayov / AP
Since the resumption of hostilities, no aid convoys or fuel shipments have entered the Gaza Strip and humanitarian operations in Gaza have largely ceased, according to the United Nations
The International Rescue Committee, an aid group working in Gaza, warned that the return of fighting “will wipe out even the minimal aid that the ceasefire has provided” and “will prove disastrous for Palestinian civilians.”