Israeli forces have surrounded Gaza City and are attacking Hamas infrastructure and destroying tunnels used by militants to launch attacks, the Israeli military said.
Airstrikes continued alongside the intensifying ground offensive in what Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described as the second stage of the war.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt Col Richard Hecht said the army had not laid a siege on Gaza City and was still urging civilians to move south to areas that Israel has designated as “safer”, although they are also regularly targeted with airstrikes.
Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed at least 9,227 Palestinians, including 3,826 children, since 7 October, the Hamas-run health ministry said on Friday.
Hecht told a news briefing: “We are powerfully deployed in the north. We will be slowly doing operations within the city taking care of their [Hamas] infrastructure. The humanitarian valve is still open, we have given people an option to move south and it is still an option.”
Hamas’s extensive network of tunnels, which Israel has nicknamed the “metro”, represents one of the biggest military challenges to Israeli forces. Used by militants to store supplies, hold hostages and travel through the territory undetected, it is vast, sophisticated and much easier to defend than to attack.
In the latest fighting, Israeli forces “uncovered and neutralised active combat tunnels,” the IDF said, describing fighters blowing up and booby-trapping parts of the network, and sharing video of attacks.
Images showed Israeli fighters peering down a reinforced concrete shaft in what appeared to be a bombed building. Another clip showed a hole in the ground covered by dried vegetation, which Hecht described as the entrance to a tunnel.
Israel also claimed that a Hamas battalion commander, Mustafa Dalul, who it said led forces in Gaza City, was killed overnight. Hecht claimed that 130 Hamas fighters were killed on Thursday. He declined to give a total for the number killed in the war.
In a sign of the intensity of the battles on Friday, the IDF named five of its own soldiers killed fighting in Gaza, bringing the total who have died on the ground there over the last week to 23.
Asked how Israel would know it had reached its goal of destroying Hamas, Hecht said it would be when Hamas’s “leadership is gone, their military capabilities are gone”, so there could never be a repeat of the 7 October attacks.
Israel declared war on Hamas after militants broke through into Israel and killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians massacred in their homes and at a dance party.
Israel has repeatedly urged civilians to evacuate from the north as it targets Hamas strongholds in the area. “The operational goal was to finish encircling the city and we are on key points. It is not a siege, there are still options for people who want to move south,” Hecht said.
But with Israeli troops on major roads and intense fighting under way around the city, it would be a dangerous journey. Hecht said he would seek more information about how civilians wanting to leave could safely communicate with Israeli troops on the ground.
“There should be a way to communicate with us,” he told the briefing. “I know it is a concern.”
Legal experts say calling on civilians to evacuate does not negate Israel’s responsibility under international humanitarian law to protect them as it wages war.
Some Palestinian civilians are not able to leave the north because of health or mobility issues. Others have chosen to stay in their homes because they have nowhere else to stay, with shelters in the south overcrowded with refugees, or because they fear the journey after civilian convoys were targeted on the road, or because attacks continue in the south.
Hecht said attacks in the south were aimed at Hamas. “If we see Hamas activity down there, we will go after it, mostly in the air.”
