Israeli troops backed by armoured vehicles and aircraft have mounted another ground raid into Gaza in advance of an expected invasion.
Infantry and engineering units struck targets overnight near the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City under cover of air force helicopters, drones and jets, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said on Friday.
It followed a substantial but limited raid into a northern part of the coastal strip the previous night in an effort to scout Hamas positions and tunnel networks.
Fresh bombardments before dawn killed dozens, including children and a journalist, Yasser Abu Namous, the Palestinian Authority-run news agency Wafa reported.
Aid workers are preparing to send eight trucks with food, medicine and water into the territory. Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said sporadic, limited deliveries were just “crumbs” when measured against the humanitarian needs of 2.4 million people.
“The current system in place is geared to fail,” he told a press conference in Jerusalem. “What is needed is meaningful and uninterrupted aid flow. And to succeed, we need a humanitarian ceasefire to ensure this aid reaches those in need.”
Lazzarini said 57 of the agency’s staff had been killed in the conflict. He issued a tacit rebuke to sceptics of casualty figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, which says more than 7,000 people have died in Gaza since 7 October. The commissioner said its figures in previous conflicts had been considered credible.
Satellite images provided by Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs show how the bombardment has reduced towns and cities to rubble, with rows of residential buildings erased.
Leaders of the 27 EU member states have unanimously called for “humanitarian corridors and pauses” of the bombing to allow food, water and medical supplies to enter the territory. More than 250 British lawyers, including professors of law, urged the UK government to press for a ceasefire, saying serious breaches of international law were being committed.
Fears of the crisis spreading across the region deepened on Friday after US warplanes bombed two locations in eastern Syria linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The strikes hit weapons storage facilities and were a response to drone and missile attacks by Iranian-backed groups against US bases and personnel in Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon said.
In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in the latest in a series of raids that have killed scores and injured hundreds. Israeli officials said one of the four killed was Ayser Mohammad Al-Amer, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad field commander.
Israeli military officials raised the number of people held hostage in Gaza to 233, five more than the 228 cited a day earlier. Relatives of some hostages protested in Tel Aviv on Thursday against what they said was government inaction to free the hostages.
“They’ve been there for 20 days,” said Meirav Leshem-Gonen, whose 23-year-old daughter Romi was abducted, the Times of Israel reported. “Twenty days in which we’ve had no idea how they’re doing, how they’re being treated, if they’re OK, if they’re breathing.”
According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, a member of a Hamas delegation in Moscow, Abu Hamid, said Hamas could not release hostages until a ceasefire was agreed.
Concern about the fate of the hostages has appeared to soften Israeli public support for a ground invasion of Gaza. Almost half of Israelis – 49% – wish to hold off, according to a poll by the newspaper Ma’ariv. It found that 29% of Israelis backed an immediate invasion, with 22% undecided. In a poll on 10 October – three days after the conflict began when Hamas militants entered southern Israel and killed more than 1,400 people – 65% backed a major ground offensive.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Thursday night a full ground incursion would be launched soon. “We are responding with fire and creating the conditions for the ongoing war. There will also be other stages,” he told Kan radio. “We are preparing them, and we will carry them out. I am determined to deliver victory.”
