GAZA: Israel’s military said on Friday it was carrying out attacks backed by airstrikes in northern Gaza, killing “dozens” of militants in an area where it declared several months ago that the Hamas command structure had been dismantled.
The operation in Shujaya, on the edge of Gaza City, caused numerous casualties, witnesses and medics said Thursday when it began.
The renewed fighting in northern Gaza followed comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday that the “intense phase” of the war was winding down after nearly nine months.
Experts say they foresee a potentially prolonged next phase.
Omer Dostri, a military expert at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said he expected the military to reduce its ground presence and increasingly use drones and fighter jets “to further defeat Hamas.”
In the Shujaya area on Friday, an AFP correspondent witnessed an airstrike and saw smoke rising. Artillery fire rang out.
In a statement, Israel’s military said troops overnight Thursday “began to carry out targeted attacks” in the Shujaya area as part of an operation that began earlier in the day.
Intelligence services have indicated “the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the Shujaya area,” the military said in its first details of the operation.
As the troops moved in, warplanes hit dozens of Hamas targets, it said, following other “significant” strikes that killed “dozens” of militants in the north.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, said on Friday that they were fighting in the northern Gaza Strip of Shujaya and that they were targeting Israeli troops with mortar shells.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli forces targeted the agency’s headquarters as they advanced in western Rafah.
Several agency employees were injured, while two fire trucks, an ambulance and an excavator used to rescue people from the rubble were damaged, one of the agency’s officials, Mohammed Al-Mugar, told AFP.
On Thursday, a military spokesman told residents and displaced Gazans in a message on social media to leave “for your safety.”
They were asked to head south to a declared “humanitarian zone” about 25 kilometers (15 miles) away.
An AFP photographer saw many Palestinians leaving on foot, carrying their belongings through the rubble of the street.
Hamas said Israeli forces were “beginning a ground incursion”, reporting “several” dead as “thousands flee under relentless bombardment”.
The war began with an October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli data.
The militants also took hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, although the military says 42 are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive killed at least 37,765 people, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
On Friday, the army announced the death of another soldier, aged 19, during fighting in southern Gaza. This brings the death toll to 314 since the beginning of ground operations in that territory.
Elsewhere in the coastal strip, paramedics reported three people killed in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, on Friday.
AFP images show that the municipal building was destroyed.
Colleagues prayed over the bodies of four civil defense volunteers killed during the bombing of the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp, other AFP images show.
Orange work vests lay on their white-clad bodies.
Witnesses reported artillery fire in Nuseirat on Friday.
The fighting in Gaza comes amid growing fears of a wider regional conflagration involving Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement. The two sides have exchanged fire almost daily since the war in Gaza began.
Such exchanges have escalated this month.
US officials have expressed hope that a ceasefire in Gaza could also lead to a reduction in hostilities on Israel’s northern border, but months of mediation, including by Egypt and Qatar, have failed to produce a deal.
Hezbollah said on Thursday it had fired “dozens” of rockets at a military base in northern Israel in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Hezbollah announced that four of its fighters were killed. The Israeli army announced that three Hezbollah operatives were killed in the airstrikes.
In Gaza, most of the population has been displaced and much of the territory’s infrastructure has been destroyed, leaving residents struggling to survive.
An estimate endorsed by the UN this week said nearly half a million people in Gaza are still suffering from “catastrophic” hunger.
An Israeli government spokesman dismissed the report, in part because it was “based on data from Hamas health institutions.”
But the Integrated Classification of Food Safety Phases, on its website, says it was created “precisely to replace potential political interference through technical neutrality”, and that its parameters are based on international standards.
Netanyahu’s announcement that the intense fighting is winding down comes with his right-wing coalition under a number of pressures.
Thousands of protesters gathered outside his residence in Jerusalem again on Thursday to call for a deal to release the hostages, an AFP reporter said.
In the Tel Aviv area, mounted police dispersed ultra-Orthodox men protesting a Supreme Court ruling that they must be called up for military service.