The war between Hamas and Israel is on. The IDF announced Friday evening that it would “expand its ground operations” in the Palestinian enclave, subject to increased bombings and no means of communication.
The sirens, whistles and deafening noise of explosions that have characterized daily life in the Gaza Strip for twenty-one days suddenly increased on Friday evening around 6 p.m. (Paris time). The north of the enclave, and Gaza City in particular, has been subjected to intense, “unprecedented” attacks since October 7 and the Hamas attack.
“Lost contact”
A few minutes after this new wave of bombings began, an Israeli army spokesman confirmed that the IDF had intensified its attacks “in a very significant way.” “We will continue to strike in Gaza City and its surrounding areas,” army spokesman Daniel Hagari added in a televised statement. Before specifying that from Friday evening the Israeli army would “expand its ground operations” in the Gaza Strip “in addition to the attacks of the last few days”, without, however, going into details and without saying whether these were the global ground invasion promised since terrorist attacks Hamas in Israel. The IDF had already confirmed in recent days that it had entered the Gaza Strip several times to carry out brief raids on Hamas members.
The bombings “by air, sea and land” were “the most violent since the beginning of the war” on October 7, the Hamas government press service said in the evening. On Friday evening, all communications with Gaza, including internet and telephone connections, were cut off. “We have completely lost contact with our operations center in the Gaza Strip and all our teams working there after the Israeli authorities cut off all communications,” the Palestinian Red Crescent said in a press release published on Twitter (renamed X). “We are deeply concerned for our teams and their ability to continue their efforts to provide emergency medical assistance as this outage impacts calls to 911 and prevents ambulances from being dispatched to the injured,” the organization added. NetBlocks, the internet access monitoring service, reported a “collapse in connectivity in the Gaza Strip.”
In a statement released on Friday evening, Hamas called on the world to “act immediately” to stop the Israeli bombings: “We call on Arab and Muslim countries and the international community to accept their responsibilities and act immediately to “To stop crimes and massacres against our people.” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on Friday evening: “Israel has just launched a ground offensive against Gaza.”
“Missile salvo”
In response to the Israeli attacks, Hamas announced on its Telegram messaging service that it would launch “salvos of rockets into the occupied territories.” [Israël, ndlr] in response to the massacres of civilians in the Palestinian territory of Gaza. According to Israeli media, rockets were fired at Tel Aviv in central Israel and at the northern West Bank, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.
In Tel Aviv, a special correspondent for Libération observed the damage caused by a rocket hitting a small four-story residential building in the popular HaArgazim neighborhood in the east of the city on Friday afternoon. This could not be intercepted in time by the “Iron Dome” anti-aircraft system.