Julian Borger |The Guardian
Gaza- Israeli forces and Hamas are fighting house-to-house battles along the length of the Gaza Strip, with devastating consequences for the civilian population amid a complete collapse in humanitarian relief.
As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been fighting their way through badly bomb-damaged urban areas in northern and southern Gaza, Hamas has increasingly relied on improvised bombs to inflict casualties and slow down the assault.
Gaza’s hospitals have reported a flood of civilian dead and injured, many of them women and children, as medical supplies dwindle, while the spread of ground combat to the south has stopped any delivery of humanitarian aid much further than the Rafah crossing point with Egypt.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said 1,207 Palestinians had been killed since the collapse of a temporary ceasefire at the beginning of the month, and that 70% of the dead were women and children.
The focal points of the fighting over the past two days have been the Jabalia refugee camp and the Shuja’iyya district in northern Gaza and Khan Younis and Bani Suheila in the south. The IDF has taken control of most of the Salah al-Din road, the main north-south highway running down the middle of the coastal strip.
On Wednesday morning, the IDF called on residents of Khan Younis to flee the city for safer areas, noting that there would be a pause until 2pm in the bombardment of Rafah, immediately to the south on the Egyptian border.
The UN and aid agencies say nowhere in Gaza is safe any more. According to the UN, 1.87 million people, more than 80% of Gaza’s population, have left their homes. Many have had to flee shelter several times in the path of the Israeli advance.
The UN Human Rights Office said on Tuesday that “the pattern of attacks that target or impact on civilian infrastructure raises serious concerns about Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and significantly raises the risk of atrocity crimes”.
The Norwegian Refugee Council said the Gaza war “now ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age”.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that the IDF was winning the war and that more than half of Hamas’s battalion commanders had been killed.
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