Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to prepare a plan to evacuate the population of Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli invasion of the southern Gaza town.
Netanyahu made the announcement on Friday following international criticism of Israel’s plan to invade the crowded town on Egypt’s border.
Israel says Rafah is the last remaining Hamas stronghold and it needs to send in troops to complete its war plan against the militant group. But an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians have crammed into the town after fleeing fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
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Netanyahu said a “massive operation” is needed in Rafah. He said he asked security officials to present a “double plan” that would include the evacuation of civilians and a military operation to “collapse” remaining Hamas militant units.
Earlier on Friday, Israel bombed targets in Rafah. The attack took place hours after Biden administration officials and aid agencies warned Israel against expanding its Gaza ground offensive to the town where more than half of the territory’s 2.3 million people have sought refuge.
Airstrikes overnight and into Friday hit two residential buildings in Rafah, while two other sites were bombed in central Gaza, including one that damaged a kindergarten-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians. Twenty-two people were killed, according to AP journalists who saw the bodies arriving at hospitals.
US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that Israel’s conduct in the war is “over the top,” the harshest US criticism yet of its close ally and an expression of concern about a soaring civilian death toll in Gaza.
The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Friday that the overall Palestinian death toll is now approaching 28,000, with about two-thirds women and children. The count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel’s stated intentions to expand its ground offensive to Rafah also prompted an unusual public backlash in Washington.
“We have yet to see any evidence of serious planning for such an operation,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, said on Thursday. Going ahead with such an offensive now, “with no planning and little thought in an area where there is sheltering of a million people would be a disaster”.
John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, said an Israel ground offensive in Rafah is “not something we would support”.
The comments signalled intensifying US friction with Netanyahu, who pushed a message of “total victory” in the war this week, at a time when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel to press for a ceasefire deal in exchange for the release of dozens of Hamas-held hostages.
With the war now in its fifth month, Israeli ground forces are still focusing on the city of Khan Younis, just north of Rafah, but Netanyahu has repeatedly said Rafah will be next, creating panic among hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Netanyahu’s words have also alarmed Egypt, which has said that any ground operation in the Rafah area or mass displacement across the border would undermine its 40-year-old peace treaty with Israel. The mostly sealed Gaza-Egypt border is also the main entry point for humanitarian aid.
More than half of Gaza’s population has fled to Rafah, heeding Israeli evacuation orders ahead of the military’s continuously expanding ground offensive. Evacuation orders now cover two-thirds of the besieged territory, though an estimated 300,000 Palestinians remain in the northern half of Gaza, which civilians were ordered to leave early on in the war.
Even in areas of refuge, such as Rafah, Israel routinely launches air strikes against what it says are Hamas targets. It holds the militant group responsible for civilian casualties because it operates from civilian areas.