Israel says 80,000 people left northern Gaza in a single day
US has pressed Israel to allow more humanitarian aid and safe passage for civilians.
Israeli troops advanced toward the heart of Gaza City, while Israeli officials said 80,000 residents travelled south Thursday, the largest movement so far in the five days since the humanitarian corridor was opened.
The military said it was closing in on the “heart of intelligence and operational activities” of militant group Hamas in an area of Gaza City near Al-Shifa hospital. The zone, the military said, was home to a war room for directing fighting, a large training ground and munitions factories used to make rockets, antitank missiles, drones and other explosives. Kindergartens and mosques were nearby, the military said.
Hamas couldn’t be reached for comment.
The U.S. and other allies have pressed Israel to allow more humanitarian aid and safe passage for trapped civilians. White House spokesmen said Thursday that Israel had agreed to daily four-hour pauses in its bombardment of northern Gaza. In an interview with Fox News on Thursday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the plan for humanitarian pauses but said the fighting would continue in other areas at those times. Both the U.S. and Israel have rejected calls for a ceasefire, which could mean either a negotiated end to the fighting or a prolonged, unilateral cessation of combat.
President Biden, however, said he had asked Netanyahu for a “pause” in fighting for “a lot more than three days,” to help with the release of hostages. Israel says Palestinian militants are holding 239 hostages of different nationalities.
Israel’s government said the U.S. call about daily pauses reflected recent efforts to facilitate civilian evacuations, but that Israel wouldn’t commit to four hours a day, as the U.S. said. In recent days, Israel has allowed civilians to flee on the main road out of north Gaza for a few hours.
“These are tactical local pauses for humanitarian aid, which are limited in time and area,” said Richard Hecht, a spokesman for the IDF. “There’s no shift.”
Hospitals that serve as the area’s main lifeline have moved to the centre of the conflict. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been sheltering at Al-Shifa hospital, camping out in the hallways of the sprawling complex that has been hit with critical shortages of fuel, medicine, antiseptics and other supplies. Video footage taken inside Al-Shifa showed patients being treated on the hospital floor, some with festering wounds.
Al Quds, another Gaza City hospital, shut down key services on Wednesday because of a lack of fuel to run generators, the United Nations said. The Al Awda hospital, the only provider of maternity services in northern Gaza, warned about an imminent closure, the U.N. said.
Palestinian Authority Health Minister Mai al-Kaila, who is based in Ramallah in the West Bank, said a shortage of medical supplies in Gaza meant doctors working there were now having to choose who to treat. “They have to prioritise which patient … can live and who can’t,” she said in an interview. Some 198 medical professionals have died in Gaza since the conflict began, she added.
Medical staff fear the hospitals will come under direct attack. Israel says it has shared intelligence with Western allies that shows Gaza hospitals are located above a network of tunnels that supply Hamas militants with fuel and weapons.
Hamas has dismissed the Israeli allegations, saying Gaza hospitals are only being used to deliver urgent medical care. Hamas officials say Israel is trying to force civilians to leave hospital areas as part of a campaign of mass displacement aimed at driving Gazans away from their homes.
With the violence showing no signs of abating, Gazans keep making their way south en masse, overwhelming aid workers. The U.N. said more than 557,000 people are sheltering in its facilities in southern Gaza. The overcrowding means there is only one toilet for every 160 people at the shelters, the U.N. said.
Health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza said that 10,812 people have been killed during the war, most of them women and children. The figures don’t distinguish between militants and civilians. Israel launched a military campaign after Hamas mounted the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.
French President Emmanuel Macron convened an international conference Thursday aimed at better co-ordination of aid and boosting access to medical treatment. France has sent ships with medical wards to the region and Egypt has opened field hospitals, but border restrictions and the chaos unleashed by the conflict have made these facilities hard to reach.
“The situation is serious and is getting worse every day,” Macron said in his opening remarks on Thursday. “Right now, it is the protection of civilians that we must work on. For this, we need a very rapid humanitarian truce and we must work for a ceasefire,” he added.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told the Paris gathering that “what the Israeli government is doing far exceeds the right to self-defence.”
The Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, told the Paris meeting that Israel’s war wasn’t against Hamas but against all Palestinian people. He accused the international community of double standards.
“How many Palestinians must be killed for the war to stop?” said Shtayyeh. “Our war is with Hamas and not with the people of Gaza,” Israel’s military said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
A new hostage video was released Thursday bearing the logo of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group allied with Hamas. It featured an elderly woman, apparently sitting in a wheelchair, from a kibbutz, and a boy who said he was 13 years old.
A spokesman for the Israeli military said such videos are “psychological terrorism of the worst kind” and asked media outlets not to show them.
Shoshanna Solomon, Noemie Bisserbe, Suha Ma’ayeh, Saleh al-Batati, Summer Said, Anas Baba and Fatima AbdulKarim contributed to this article.
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