RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Heavy fighting raged across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Sunday, including in the devastated north, as Israel continued its offensive after the United States blocked the latest international push for a ceasefire and shipped more ammunition to Israel had close allies.
After the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians, Israel faces increasing international outrage and calls for a permanent ceasefire. Nearly 85% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced within the besieged territory, where U.N. officials say there is no safe place to flee.
The United States has again provided key support to the offensive in recent days, vetoing United Nations Security Council efforts to end the fighting, which enjoyed broad international support, and an emergency sale of tank ammunition worth over $100 million -dollars to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked US President Joe Biden for the “important ammunition for continuing the war” and for supporting Israel in the Security Council.
The U.S. has pledged unwavering support for Israel's goal of dismantling Hamas's military and governance capabilities and returning all hostages captured in the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war. Hamas and other Palestinian militants stormed into southern Israel that day, killing about 1,200 people and capturing about 240, over 100 of whom were released during a week-long ceasefire late last month.
Netanyahu's office said Sunday that Hamas still had 117 hostages, as well as the remains of 20 people who were in captivity or killed during the Oct. 7 attack. The militants hope to trade them for large numbers of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
In response to the attack, Israel launched an air and ground war that killed thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, and forced some 1.9 million people to flee their homes. With only a trickle of aid being allowed in and delivery impossible in much of the territory, Palestinians face severe shortages of food, water and other basic goods.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who last week invoked a rarely used power to call for a ceasefire, said: “We face a grave danger of the collapse of the humanitarian system.”
“The situation is rapidly deteriorating into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible consequences for the Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region,” he told a forum in Qatar.
Israel's national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, told Israel's Channel 12 television late Saturday that the United States had not set a deadline for Israel to achieve its goals of dismantling Hamas and repatriating all hostages.
“The assessment that this cannot be measured in weeks is correct, and I am not sure it can be measured in months,” he said.
FIGHTS AND ARRESTS IN THE NORTH
Even in northern Gaza, where entire neighborhoods have been leveled by airstrikes and where ground troops have been deployed for more than six weeks, Israeli forces continue to face stiff resistance.
Israel's Channel 13 television broadcast footage showing dozens of prisoners stripped to their underwear and holding their hands in the air. Several held assault rifles above their heads, and one man could be seen slowly walking forward and placing a weapon on the ground before returning to the group.
Other videos in recent days showed groups of unarmed men held in similar conditions, without clothing, bound and blindfolded. Men from another group of detainees who were released Saturday told the Associated Press they were beaten and denied food and water.
Israeli media has portrayed the mass arrests as a sign that Hamas in the north is surrendering.
However, residents said that there are still incidents in Gaza's Shijaiyah neighborhood and in the Jabaliya refugee camp, a densely populated urban area that is home to Palestinian families who fled or were expelled from the area during the war that founded modern-day Israel in 1948 heavy fighting was underway.
“They attack anything that moves,” said Hamza Abu Fatouh, a resident of Shijaiyah. He said the dead and wounded were left on the streets because ambulances could no longer reach the area where Israeli snipers and tanks had positioned themselves among the abandoned buildings.
“The resistance is also fighting back,” he added, saying there were shootings late Saturday.
Israel ordered the evacuation of the northern third of the territory, including Gaza City, early in the war, but tens of thousands of people remained there, fearing that the south would not be safer or that they would never be allowed to return to their homes.
NO SAFE PLACES
According to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-controlled area, the war is now in its third month and the Palestinian death toll in Gaza has exceeded 17,700, the majority of them women and children. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian casualties and says the militants endanger civilians by fighting in densely populated neighborhoods. According to the military, 97 Israeli soldiers died in the ground offensive. Palestinian militants also continued to fire rockets at Israel.
Israel says it has given detailed instructions for the evacuation of civilians to safer areas, even as it continues to strike what it says are militant targets in all parts of the territory. Thousands have fled in recent days to the southern city of Rafah and other areas along the border with Egypt – one of the last areas where aid agencies can deliver food and water.
Israel has designated a narrow section of the barren southern coast, Muwasi, as a safe zone. But the Palestinians there live in overcrowded living conditions, there is hardly any accommodation and no toilets.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned on Sunday that “ideal conditions for the spread of disease” would be created as displaced people crowd into smaller areas without adequate food, water, shelter and sanitation.
The war has raised tensions across the region, with Lebanon's Hezbollah trading fire with Israel along the border and other Iranian-backed militant groups attacking the US in Syria and Iraq.
France said one of its warships in the Red Sea shot down two drones that approached it from Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels have vowed to stop Israeli shipping through the crucial waterway.
Hanegbi said Israel had called on its Western allies to deal with the threat and would give them “some time” to organize a response. But he said if the threats persist, “we will act to lift this blockade.”
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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press reporters Melanie Lidman and Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Lujain Jo in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
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Complete AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war