Israel calls them blocks 36, 38 to 54 and 219 to 221. These are the areas of Gaza’s second largest city, Khan Yunis, which dozens of tanks are approaching this Monday and whose evacuation requires the army to head towards another city, Rafah. calls have also been bombed. The armed forces have distributed leaflets and text messages including a map with three yellow arrows pointing towards Rafah, further south and the Mediterranean coast, as well as text pointing to a list of emergency shelters. Amid the constant noise of attacks, the population feels that there is no safe place in Gaza and that each escape is just a prelude to the next. “People are asking us to tell them where they can find safety. We have nothing to say to them,” complained the director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, Thomas White, on the social network X. “Even in Rafah, where people have to flee, the sound of the air can be heard. “Raids mark the day.”
The new Israeli message contains a link to another map (with hundreds of boxes on which these blocks appear), which can be accessed via a mobile phone with a QR code. To access it you need a data internet connection. After weeks of frequent outages, the largest telecommunications operator Paltel announced late in the evening the “complete suspension” of all its communications and internet services in Gaza, as routes that could be repaired following the previous blackout in October were disrupted.
The army released the map last Friday, at the end of the week of the ceasefire and the start of its campaign in the south, the precarious temporary home of 1.8 of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, as the majority of the now-devastated territory’s residents resort to violence was expelled. north of the Strip.
More information
Khan Yunis, whose population is estimated to have increased from 200,000 to 400,000 as a result of war-displaced people, has become one of the main targets of Israeli bombing. The army has partially declared it a “dangerous war zone.” The plane destroyed numerous buildings in Hamad City, a housing project with thousands of apartments where displaced people from other parts of the Gaza Strip sought refuge. According to residents quoted by Agence France Presse, they were warned about the bombing an hour in advance.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
Qatar – now an intermediary in the exchange of hostages and prisoners and a major financier of the Gaza Strip in recent years – built Hamad City to resettle destitute Palestinians killed in Israel’s 2014 offensive, the deadliest until the offensive that left Hamas The attack caused them to lose their home on October 7th. Around 2,300 Palestinians died; In the current case there are 15,899, 70% of them minors and women, more or less at the same time, according to data published on Monday by the Gaza Strip Ministry of Health.
The United States, which supplies Israel with weapons for its offensive (around 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells, according to the Wall Street Journal) but is concerned about the number of civilian deaths, considers the Israeli army’s plans for the south to be more cautious. “It is no secret that we believe too many Palestinians in the north have died in the first few weeks […]. We have seen improvements in plans for Khan Yunis in the south and in evacuation plans for neighborhoods rather than entire areas. I hope that the number of displaced people will be fewer. But we will monitor the results very closely,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said during his daily media appearance on Monday.
Several people in the rubble after an attack on Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip this Monday. EMPLOYEES (Portal)
Israel aims to politically and militarily destroy Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza. It envisages a long war lasting at least two more months, followed by regime change, permanent security control by Israel and the establishment of a security buffer zone. To achieve this, it is not enough to penetrate the capital and the rest of the northern Gaza Strip, but it is essential to also penetrate the urban centers in the south such as Khan Yunis. Since it is considered a fiefdom of Hamas, it has an additional symbolic component: it is the birthplace of Yahia Sinwar, the leader of the Islamist party militia and today Israel’s most wanted leader. He is believed to be hidden underground and has no access to electronic devices that could be detected by intelligence agencies.
“Our Munich”
The target is not limited to Gaza. Israel intends to use Hamas to emulate the murder campaign invented by Steven Spielberg, which the Mossad led in various parts of the world after the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and which was originally intended to last 20 years.
Last Sunday, Israeli public television reported a recording in which Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet (the intelligence services in Israel and Palestine), asserted that his country was determined to kill all Hamas leaders “everywhere.” even if…” it takes years.” “In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar… All of them […]. The cabinet has given us one goal: the elimination of Hamas. And we are determined to do it. “This is our Munich.”
The mention of Türkiye did not go unnoticed there. An official of the country’s intelligence agency assured Portal that they had conveyed the “necessary warnings” to their Israeli interlocutors that such an action “would have serious consequences.”
Another goal of Israel is the return of the hostages. Although negotiations continue behind the scenes, there is a feeling that the return of hostilities has pushed the issue further into the background, although there are still 137 abducted people in Gaza (115 men, 20 women and two children). 15 of them, both soldiers and civilians, were declared dead, particularly after the release of hostages who returned with information confirming their deaths. This does not mean that they were murdered there by Hamas or died in Israeli bombings, as bodies may have been brought to the Gaza Strip as early as October 7th.
This Sunday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reiterated that the military advance does not contradict efforts to release the abductees, but quite the opposite: it is pushing Hamas to negotiate the exchange of Palestinian prisoners. “For the past two months, I have focused on achieving the goals of the war: destroying Hamas’ military and administrative capabilities and bringing the hostages home. And these two goals are closely related,” he said at a meeting with family representatives.
A day earlier, thousands of people demonstrated in Tel Aviv to call on the government to commit to repatriating the abducted people remaining in Gaza. Characterized by two mottos: “Everyone!” and “Now!” – for the first time with the voices of freed hostages. In the end, a smaller group brought charges against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This Monday they are threatening a sit-in if the War Cabinet does not welcome them to explain what they are doing to get their loved ones back.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_