Israel withdraws from northern Gaza and launches an attack on its south as U.S. anger escalates
Financial Times
Israel has ordered Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate a large area of territory in the southern Strip, as aerial bombardment intensified that has killed hundreds of people since a fragile truce with Hamas collapsed on Friday.
The evacuation order appeared to signal a possible new ground offensive in and near Khan Younis, Gaza's second-largest city and now the largest population center in the South. Leaflets were dropped from warplanes and mass text messages warned of the upcoming heavy military activity.
The fighting escalated even after U.S. officials, from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Vice President Kamala Harris, warned Israel to take more steps to protect civilians in Gaza. The United States pays up to a fifth of Israel's defense budget - currently pegged at 3.8 billion dollars a year - under the Obama administration agreement.
"In this kind of fighting, the center of gravity is the civilian population."If you lead them into the arms of the enemy, you replace tactical victory with strategic defeat,"Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in California this weekend.
Asked on Sunday about the American concerns, Elon levy, a spokesman for the Israeli government, said: "We fully agree that many people have been killed in this war. It is a sad fact that everyone has been killed since October 7th. . . He will still be alive if Hamas does not decide to wage this war."
In response to Harris 'comments that the civilian death toll in Gaza was too high, Levy insisted that" the IDF has made every effort [in] upholding our obligations under international law to keep civilians out of harm's way".
Israel and Hamas returned to fighting when a week-long truce collapsed on Friday morning, after they exchanged hostages for Palestinian prisoners in a Qatar-brokered pause in hostilities that also included a new influx of humanitarian aid.
Officials from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said on Sunday afternoon that 316 people had been killed since the truce collapsed on Friday. But they added that this counted only those who were brought to hospitals, estimating that many were under the rubble.
The United Nations said dozens of people were killed in an airstrike on Saturday on a six-story building in a refugee camp in northern Gaza, after residents were given an hour and a half notice to evacuate.
A block in Gaza City was hit later on Saturday, destroying 50 residential buildings, the United Nations said. The number of injuries caused by this accident is not yet known.
After Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken also conveyed concerns about the civilian death toll to the Israeli war cabinet, the IDF made general plans to issue evacuation orders from Joar to the Palestinians before military operations.
But the United Nations, human rights groups and Palestinians said the orders were impractical, especially when almost the entire population of the besieged enclave of 2.3 million was already crowded in the southern part of Gaza.
Israel has proposed, but not yet implemented, a so-called 14-square-kilometer safe zone in southern Gaza, an area slightly larger than London's Heathrow Airport. However, UN officials said that safe zones cannot be declared unilaterally in a war zone.
Along Israel's northern border with Lebanon, the IDF said that an anti-tank missile targeted an Israeli military vehicle, wounding soldiers with shrapnel. The IDF responded with artillery.
