• Thousands of civilians flee north Gaza
• Hezbollah warns of regional war if bombing goes on
By Emma Emeozor with agency report
Chief Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari yesterday said combat engineers were using explosive devices to destroy a Hamas tunnel network that stretches for hundreds of kilometres (miles) beneath Gaza.
In a statement, the military said it had destroyed 130 tunnel shafts so far. “Combat engineers fighting in Gaza are destroying the enemy’s weapons and are locating, exposing and detonating tunnel shafts,” it said. Air strikes had also killed a Hamas weapons maker, Mahsein Abu Zina, and several fighters, the Israeli military said.
Israeli tanks have met heavy resistance from Hamas fighters using the tunnels to stage ambushes, according to sources with Hamas and the separate Islamic Jihad militant group. Israel said 33 of its soldiers have been killed.
Gaza City, the Hamas militant group’s main stronghold in the territory, is now surrounded by Israeli forces. The military said troops have advanced to the heart of the densely-populated city while Hamas says its fighters have inflicted heavy losses.
G7 foreign ministers, meeting in Tokyo, called for a humanitarian pause in the fighting. A G7 statement said Israel had the right to defend itself but civilians must be protected and international humanitarian law followed. A two-state solution “remains the only path to a just, lasting, and secure peace,” it said.
Such a solution, envisaging the creation of an independent country for Palestinians in territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, has long been the aim of international peace efforts but the process has been moribund since 2014.
Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian civilians trudged in a forlorn procession out of the north of Gaza yesterday seeking refuge from Israeli air strikes and fierce ground fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants.
The exodus took place in a four-hour window of opportunity announced by Israel, which has told residents to evacuate the north encircled by its armoured forces or risk being trapped in the violence.
But the central and southern parts of the small, besieged Palestinian enclave also came under fire again as the war between its Islamist Hamas rulers and Israel entered its second month.
Meanwhile, the second in command of Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian backed militia in Lebanon has said Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza risks wider war in the Middle East.
Sheikh Naim Qassem told the BBC that “very serious and very dangerous developments could occur in the region, and no-one would be able to stop the repercussions”.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader was speaking in an interview in Beirut, as the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said more than 10,000 people had been killed there.
Israel’s assault follows the Hamas attacks on 7 October which killed 1,400 people – 1,000 of them civilians.
“The danger is real,” he said, “because Israel is increasing its aggression against civilians and killing more women and children. Is it possible for this to continue and increase, without bringing real danger to the region? I think not.”
He insisted any escalation would be linked to Israel’s actions. “Every possibility has a response,” he said. Hezbollah, “the Party of God” has plenty of possibilities. The Shia Islamist group, classed as a terrorist organisation by the UK, US and the Arab League is the largest political and military force in Lebanon. So far its response to the war in Gaza has involved amplifying its warnings, but carefully calibrating its actions.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that the number of civilians killed in the Gaza Strip shows that there is something “clearly wrong” with Israel’s military operations against Hamas Palestinian militants.
Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, after the militants killed 1,400 people and took more than 240 hostages in an Oct. 7 attack. Israel has struck Gaza – an enclave of 2.3 million people – from the air, imposed a siege and launched a ground invasion.
“There are violations by Hamas when they have human shields. But when one looks at the number of civilians that were killed with the military operations, there is something that is clearly wrong,” Guterres told Reuters NEXT.
Palestinian officials said 10,569 people have now been killed, 40% of them children. “It is also important to make Israel understand that it is against the interests of Israel to see every day the terrible image of the dramatic humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people,” Guterres said. “That doesn’t help Israel in relation to the global public opinion.”
Guterres compared the number of children being killed in Gaza with the toll in conflicts around the world that he reports on annually to the U.N. Security Council. “Every year, the highest number of killings of children by any of the actors in all the conflicts that we witness is the maximum in the hundreds,” Guterres said.
“We have in a few days in Gaza thousands and thousands of children killed, which means there is also something clearly wrong in the way military operations are being done,” he said. Palestinian health officials said an air strike that hit houses in the Nusseirat refugee camp killed 18 people on Wednesday morning. In Khan Younis, six people, including a young girl, were killed in an air strike.
“We were sitting in peace when all of a sudden an F16 air strike landed on a house and blew it up, the entire block, three houses next to each other,” said a witness, Mohammed Abu Daqa.
“Civilians, all of them civilians. An old woman, an old man and there are others still missing under the rubble.” Palestinian officials said 10,569 people have now been killed, 40% of them children. The level of death and suffering is “hard to fathom”, U.N. health agency spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said in Geneva.