Israel hammers Gaza Strip, intensifies attack in south
The Israeli military pounded the Gaza Strip with strikes over the weekend and said some Hamas fighters had surrendered in northern Gaza as it intensified its offensive in the south.
Sunday morning, the Israeli military said that it had struck more than 250 “targets” in Gaza over the past 24 hours, including some in the south. In a statement, it also mentioned an operation in the north – specifically the Shajaiya neighborhood of Gaza City.
That’s where the Israeli military said a day earlier that some Hamas fighters had surrendered. It did not say how many operatives it was holding, but said they had surrendered in both the Shajaiya and Jabalia neighborhoods of Gaza City. The claims came two days after Israel said it had detained hundreds of terrorism suspects.
Videos have appeared on social media and on Israeli news channels in recent days showing what have been described as Hamas fighters detained by Israeli forces. Those videos could not be independently verified, and there were accounts of ordinary Gaza civilians among what had been described as Hamas fighters.
About 15 miles south of Gaza City, in Khan Younis, the Israeli military ordered people to evacuate “urgently” from the city center, publishing a map of the area that it appeared to plan to target. The expansion of Israel’s ground operation has forced many people who have already been displaced to again move.
The intensified fighting in Gaza came after a United Nations vote demanding a permanent cease-fire last week. The effort failed because the United States cast the sole vote against it. Governments, human rights groups and aid organizations condemned the United States, saying it was “complicit” in the rising death toll among civilians in the territory. Israel has conducted more than two months of aerial and ground assaults in Gaza, which have killed at least 17,000 people there, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The U.S. government has said that it has urged Israel to do more to protect civilians, especially as Israeli forces intensify operations in southern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza have fled after the first few weeks of fighting in the north. But neither the United States nor Israel has said what exactly is being done to limit civilian casualties.
On Friday, the State Department notified Congress that it had used an emergency provision in the arms export act to approve the sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. The approval came before Congress finished a review generally required for arms sales to a foreign nation.
Israel had previously asked the State Department to approve an order for 45,000 tank rounds, the largest order from Israel for the ammunition, U.S. officials said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.