Israelis launch new Gaza offensive, as sweeping evacuation ordered

Operation aims to stop militant resurgence in Gaza, says Israeli military, as it also targets Beirut area with heavy bombardment.

A Palestinian family arrives in Gaza City after evacuating their homes in the Jabalia area on Sunday. Picture: AFP

Israel’s military has reopened an offensive in northern Gaza to combat militants who have resurfaced in the area, issuing sweeping evacuation orders after residents reported heavy artillery shelling.

The military said two of its armoured brigades encircled part of Jabalia, a longtime Hamas stronghold in northern Gaza in which it has fought several times over the past year, as an infantry division began an operation in the area on Sunday.

Ahead of what is expected to be a broader push, the military called on the 300,000 residents estimated to still be living in northern Gaza to move through evacuation corridors to an expanded humanitarian zone in the south, threatening to exacerbate dire living conditions in the enclave. It is one of the most sweeping evacuation calls since Israel first urged residents of Gaza’s north to clear out last October, in the weeks ahead of its ground invasion.

The operation came as Israel, now fighting on an additional front, also pressed its air campaign against Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants with a night of heavy strikes on southern Beirut.

It also came amid expectations that Israel would strike Iran after signalling it would retaliate for Tehran’s missile barrage on the country last week. The military said it is on high alert offensively as well as defensively.

Hussam Abu Safiya, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said the facility received the bodies of 30 people, and residents reported intense artillery shelling that recalled the earliest days of the war, which began almost one year ago.

Hiba Baghdadi, 35, said the attacks in Gaza overnight reminded her of the first week of the war, when Israel launched a punishing air campaign after Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel on October 7 last year that left 1200 people killed and 250 taken hostage.

“People had to leave Jabalia under fire,” said Ms Baghdadi, who lives in the Al-Tuffah neighbourhood of nearby Gaza City. Ms Baghdadi said she wouldn’t abide by the evacuation orders. “We aren’t going to go south, it is terrible there and people are suffering,” she said. “If we are to be killed, let us be killed in our homes.”

Palestinian children sit with their belongings in the back of a makeshift trolley as they arrive in Gaza City after being evacuated from Jabalia on Sunday. Picture: AFP

A day before the first anniversary of war between Israel and Hamas-led militants in Gaza, Israel was back to fighting in one of the first areas where it clashed with Hamas in late 2023, underscoring the difficulty of converting Israel’s tactical wins on the battlefield into a decisive victory.

Hamas’s October 7 attack in southern Israel started a devastating war that has left most of Gaza’s over two million residents displaced amid widespread concerns about hunger, access to clean water, sanitation and spread of disease. Palestinian health authorities say the fighting has killed more than 40,000 people.

Hadeel Kaheel, 29, from the Daraj neighbourhood in Gaza City, fled twice within the city but says this time she won’t leave her home. “There’s no safe place, no humanitarian zone,” she said.

Israel wants to move civilians from north to south Gaza to isolate militants in the north, whom Israel doesn’t think will chance crossing military checkpoints to the south for fear of getting caught, said Amir Avivi, a former senior military official who heads a security-oriented think tank in Israel.

A young Gazan collects water in refugee camp at Khan Younis. Picture: AFP

Tensions are running high around the war’s one-year mark. An assailant killed a woman and wounded at least 10 other people in a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba on Sunday, in what police said was a suspected terrorist attack. The attack came just hours after Israel’s military said it was reinforcing the Gaza border region with additional forces.

Israel said it has degraded Hamas’s military to the point that it no longer operates with organised command-and-control systems. However, without a plan for alternative leadership of the Gaza Strip, Hamas and other militants continue to reconstitute themselves, requiring Israeli forces to return multiple times to fight in areas they have previously cleared and left, including several operations in Jabalia.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted efforts to commit to a plan for Gaza’s long-term governance. Defence minister Yoav Gallant has for nearly a year pushed the cabinet to consider fresh leadership for Gaza, to prevent the erosion of Israeli military gains and head off the option of a return to Israel’s civil occupation of the strip, which it ended in 2005.

Israel remains mired in this cycle as its war has expanded to multiple fronts. Fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon is now demanding most of its resources, after fighting largely slowed in Gaza apart from the need for repeated clearing operations, while efforts to reach a ceasefire-for-hostages deal have stalled.

Residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs reported heavy strikes overnight on Sunday, as the Israeli military said it was attacking weapons storage facilities and infrastructure tied to Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that dozens of Israeli airstrikes pummelled Beirut’s southern suburbs in one of the most intense bombings of the area, which has been targeted daily since the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah there on September 27.

An Israeli army spokesman warned residents of four districts in the southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a heavy presence, to move 500m away from particular buildings it alleged were Hezbollah facilities. Many of the area’s residents have already fled, adding to a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon where hundreds of thousands of people across the country have been displaced by Israel’s bombing campaign, which has launched 3000 airstrikes in recent weeks and more than 150 in the past day.

The Israeli military said on sundy it engaged militants in close-quarter fighting over the past day, while conducting targeted raids that began earlier this week close to the Israel-Lebanon border .

Militants in Lebanon fired more than two dozen projectiles into Israel on Sunday, in addition to three drones launched from the east toward Israel in the early morning.

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