Israel-Hamas war: Israel fights in ‘depths’ of Gaza City, foresees control of enclave’s security after war

The Israeli army says its forces are battling Hamas fighters inside Gaza’s largest city, signalling a major new stage a month into a war that has claimed thousands of lives and levelled swaths of the territory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was likely to maintain control of security in Gaza once Hamas was defeated.

The move into Gaza City risks a further escalation in casualties, while Netanyahu’s comments pointed to the uncertainty surrounding the endgame of a war that Israel says will go on until it destroys Hamas rule.

Already the war has brought a staggering cost.

Memorial events were planned in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to mark the 30th day — a milestone in Jewish mourning — since the deaths of about 1400 people killed in Hamas’ October 7 rampage in southern Israel that sparked the war. Some 240 people who Hamas abducted during the attack remain in the militants’ hands. More than 250,000 have evacuated homes near Gaza and the Lebanon border amid continuous militant rocket fire towards Israeli cities and towns.

A month of relentless bombardment in Gaza has killed more than 10,300 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and minors, according the Health Ministry of the Hamas-run territory. More than 2300 are believed buried from strikes that reduced entire city blocks to rubble. About 70 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes, and more than 700,000 of them are crowded into UN schools-turned-shelters, relying on a trickle of aid and their own daily foraging for food and water from supplies choked off by weeks of siege.

Israeli ground troops have battled Palestinian militants inside Gaza for over a week, cutting the territory in half and encircling Gaza City. Chief Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Israeli ground forces “are located right now in a ground operation in the depths of Gaza City and putting great pressure on Hamas”.

Speaking in an interview with ABC on Monday, Netanyahu said the military had killed several thousand Hamas fighters since the war began. The Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants — and slain fighters not brought to hospitals would not be in its count.

Fleeing south

Israel unleashed another wave of strikes across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday as hundreds more Palestinians fled Gaza City to the south.

Some arrived on donkey carts, most on foot, some pushing elderly relatives in wheelchairs, all visibly exhausted. Many had nothing but the clothes on their back. “There is no food or drink, people are fighting in the bakeries,” said one man.

Hundreds of thousands have heeded Israeli orders to head to the southern part of Gaza, out of the ground assault’s path. Others are afraid to do so because Israeli troops control part of the north-south route.

But bombardment of the south has also continued.

Mahmoud Shor (centre) the father of the three children killed with their grandmother by an Israeli airstrike, weeps during their funeral in the town of Ainata. Photo / AP

An Israeli airstrike destroyed several homes on Tuesday in Khan Younis. An Associated Press journalist at the scene saw first responders pulling five bodies — including three dead children — from the rubble. One man wept as he carried a bloodied young girl, until a rescue worker pried her from his arms, saying, “Let her go, let her go,” to rush her to an ambulance.

AP video at a nearby hospital showed a woman desperately searching for her son, then crying and kissing him when she found him, half-naked and bloodied, but apparently without serious injuries. A girl sobbed next to a baby on a stretcher, apparently dead.

“We were sleeping, babies, children, elderly,” said one survivor, Ahmad al-Najjar, who is the general director at the Education Ministry in Gaza.

In the town of Deir al-Balah, rescue workers brought out at least four dead and several wounded children from the wreckage of a flattened building, witnesses said. “My daughter,” screamed a woman as she ran behind them.

Israel says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and accuses the group of endangering civilians by operating among them.

At a school in Khan Younis, thousands of displaced were living in classrooms and the playground. One of them, Suhaila al-Najjar, said the past month had been filled with sleepless nights.

“What’s to come? How will we live? Bakeries have closed, there’s no gas. What will we eat?” she said.

Israel to maintain control of Gaza

Israel has vowed to remove Hamas from power and crush its military capabilities — but neither Israel nor its main ally, the United States, has said what would come next.

Netanyahu told ABC News that Gaza should be governed by “those who don’t want to continue the way of Hamas”, without elaborating.

“I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, have the overall security responsibility because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it. When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine,” he said.

Netanyahu did not make clear what shape that security control would take. US officials have advised that Israel should not reoccupy Gaza.

Relatives of the victims of an Israeli airstrike mourn during their funeral procession in the town of Blida. Photo / AP

Israeli officials say the offensive against Hamas will last for some time and acknowledge they have not yet formulated a plan for the “Day After”. The defence minister has said Israel does not seek a long-term reoccupation of Gaza, but predicted a lengthy phase of low-intensity fighting against “pockets of resistance”. Other officials have spoken about establishing a buffer zone that would keep Palestinians away from the Israeli border.

“There are a number of options being discussed for The Day After Hamas,” said Ophir Falk, a senior adviser to Netanyahu. “The common denominator of all the plans is that 1) there is no Hamas; 2) that Gaza is demilitarized; 3) Gaza is deradicalised.”

Israel withdrew troops and settlers in 2005, but kept control over Gaza’s airspace, coastline, population registry and border crossings, except one into Egypt. Hamas seized power from forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007, confining his Palestinian Authority to parts of the occupied West Bank. Since then, Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade on Gaza to varying degrees.

In his ABC interview, Netanyahu also expressed openness for the first time to “little pauses” in the fighting to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza or the release of hostages. But he ruled out any general ceasefire without the release of all the hostages.

Heavy fighting in the north

For now, Israel’s troops are focused on northern Gaza, including Gaza City, which, before the war, was home to some 650,000 people. Israel says Hamas has extensive militant infrastructure within residential areas, including a vast tunnel network.

The military says it has killed thousands of Hamas fighters, while 30 Israeli troops have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began.

Several hundred thousand people are believed to remain in the north in the assault’s path.

Residents in northern Gaza reported heavy battles overnight into Tuesday morning on the outskirts of Gaza City. The Shati refugee camp — a built-up district housing refugees from the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and their descendants — had been heavily bombarded over the past two days, residents said.

The war has also stoked wider tensions, with Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group trading fire along the border. More than 160 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war began, mainly during violent protests and gun battles with Israeli forces during arrest raids.

Hundreds of trucks carrying aid have been allowed to enter Gaza from Egypt since October 21. But humanitarian workers say the aid is far short of mounting needs. Egypt’s Rafah Crossing has also opened to allow hundreds of foreign passport holders and medical patients to leave Gaza.