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Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip on Monday, closing in on the besieged Palestinian territory’s main city as their retaliatory ground offensive against Hamas rumbled violently through a fourth consecutive day.
Fears of a widening regional conflict continued to grow. Israeli forces carried out airstrikes against military infrastructure in Syria, where rockets were launched into open Israeli territory. Israeli troops and Hezbollah operatives clashed on the border with Lebanon.
The brunt of the war is in Gaza. United Nations officials and local medical personnel said Monday that Israeli airstrikes were too close to hospitals in and around Gaza City. Thousands of Palestinians are seeking shelter among the wounded in hospitals and in badly overcrowded schools across Gaza.
Israeli officials say their focus is on killing Hamas fighters and destroying the group’s infrastructure in Gaza but warn that the militants have repeatedly employed “human shields.” They hide and operate among civilians in a manner that increases the risk of casualties.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed in a media briefing Monday that the Israeli offensive would not let up. He brushed off calls to delay or scrub the operation to protect millions of Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza.
“Calls for a cease-fire are a call for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen,” Mr. Netanyahu said in English. “The Bible says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war.”
Israeli officials cited progress in the Gaza ground campaign. The leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said soldiers had killed “dozens” of Hamas militants with precision airstrikes and pitched gunbattles with fighters barricaded inside buildings near the route of the widening armored advance.
“IDF soldiers in the Gaza Strip identified armed terrorists and an anti-tank that was about to be launched in the area of the [Al-Azhar University-Gaza] in the Gaza Strip and directed a fighter jet that attacked them,” the IDF said in a statement.
“In the last day, about 600 targets were attacked, including warehouses, hiding places and gatherings of Hamas operatives and anti-tank positions,” the IDF said in a sobering assessment.
The ground campaign is a response to Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 assault that killed 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals, mostly civilians, and captured well over 200 others.
Israeli officials say they have identified 230 people kidnapped by Hamas who are still held in Gaza. The number grows every day as Israel identifies missing people. Hamas is believed to have released just four hostages: two American women and two older Israeli women. Israeli officials said their troops rescued a fifth Hamas hostage Monday, a young female Israeli soldier.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said additional infantry, armored, engineering and artillery units were moving into Gaza and that the ground operation would “expand and intensify.”
U.N. and Palestinian sources in Gaza described a spiraling humanitarian disaster. The death toll among Palestinians has passed 8,300, mostly women and children, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The figure is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
More than 1.4 million people in Gaza have fled their homes. Civilian conditions are deteriorating as food, medicine and fuel run dangerously low. On Sunday, the largest convoy of humanitarian aid yet — 33 trucks — entered from Egypt. Relief workers said the amount is far less than needed for the population of 2.3 million.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said nearly 672,000 Palestinians were sheltering in its schools and other facilities across Gaza that have reached four times their capacity. Crowded hospitals in northern Gaza are under growing threat.
Strikes hit near Gaza City’s Shifa and Al Quds hospitals and the Indonesian and Turkish hospitals in northern Gaza in recent days, the U.N. and residents said Monday, according to The Associated Press. All 10 hospitals operating in northern Gaza have received evacuation orders, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Local staff have refused to leave, saying an evacuation would amount to a death sentence for patients on ventilators.
Two sides of a war
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met Sunday with families of Israelis held captive in Gaza. “It was important for me to meet and hear from you …,” he said. “Returning the hostages and tracking missing Israelis is a mission of utmost importance.”
The defense minister said the ground offensive is linked to efforts to return the hostages. “You have all seen who Hamas is. There is nothing more important than returning the hostages and eradicating Hamas,” he said.
Despite claiming progress in its ground operations against Hamas, the Israeli military remained vague about its specific operations inside Gaza, including the location and number of troops. The movements of recent days, including stepped-up ground operations north and east of Gaza City and calls for residents to head south, point to a focus on the city.
Israel said much of Hamas’ forces and militant infrastructure, including hundreds of miles of tunnels, are in Gaza City. Before the war, the city was home to more than 650,000 people, comparable to the population of the District of Columbia.
Hamas militants have continued to fire rockets into Israel in recent days, including toward the commercial hub of Tel Aviv. Roughly 250,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes because of violence along the border with Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon, the Israeli military said.
In Sderot, which borders Gaza, the once-bustling streets are now silent. The city of 30,000 has suffered from Hamas rocket fire for decades. It was always resilient, and new apartment buildings and playgrounds mushroomed in the city in recent years.
Oct. 7 marked something new for Sderot residents. Terrorists entered the city in white pickup trucks, massacred people at bus stops, gunned down drivers and attacked the police station. The result is a city almost deserted.
On a recent night, one lone man sat on the roof of a house overlooking Gaza. Nearby soldiers patrolled several hillocks. Buildings under construction, the cement freshly poured, sat empty, dark and ghostly. In the distance lay Gaza, just a mile away.
The buzzing of drones could be heard overhead. Above the clanging of armored vehicles churning up sand, dust from the movement clogged the air. In the distance, the endless reverberations of artillery fire and airstrikes pounded the ground. Flashes of light several miles away illuminated the clouds.
Fears of a regional conflict
The Biden administration continued to express full-throated support for Israel — America’s closest ally in the Middle East — while pressing the Israelis to act with enough restraint to minimize civilian suffering and prevent the war from spreading.
On Sunday, President Biden told Mr. Netanyahu via telephone that Israeli forces inside Gaza should act within “international humanitarian law that prioritizes the protection of civilians,” according to a White House readout of the call.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. stands firmly with Mr. Netanyahu in rejecting international calls for a Gaza cease-fire as long as Hamas remains unbroken and in control of the Palestinian enclave.
“We believe that a cease-fire right now benefits Hamas, and Hamas is the only one that would gain from that right now,” Mr. Kirby told a White House briefing.
While Israel sends tanks into Gaza, fighting continues in the north. Iran-backed Hezbollah militants opened fire at an IDF post on the Lebanon border overnight Sunday. No injuries were reported. IDF troops responded with artillery fire that destroyed a building used by Hezbollah leadership, officials said.
In the West Bank, Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes against militants clashing with its forces in the Jenin refugee camp, the scene of repeated Israeli raids. Hamas said four of its fighters were killed there.
Geir Pedersen, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, warned that the Israel-Hamas conflict was spilling into the country. He said Syria is “at its most dangerous situation for a long time,” fueled by growing instability and the lack of a political solution to its 12-year-old civil war.
Mr. Pedersen told the U.N. Security Council that he was “sounding an alarm” that the Syrian people face “a terrifying prospect of a potential wider escalation.”
Pentagon officials warned that Iran-backed militias have attacked U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria at least 23 times since Hamas rampaged against Israel.
Roughly 900 U.S. forces are deployed in Syria to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State terrorist group. A senior Defense Department official said a mix of rockets and one-way attack drones were used in the nine strikes targeting the Americans from Oct. 17 through Oct. 30.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, vowed that the United States would continue to respond to attacks on U.S. personnel and facilities in Syria “or against U.S. interests.” She accused “terrorist groups,” some backed by Syria and Iran, of threatening to expand the Gaza conflict “by using Syrian territory to plot and launch attacks against Israel.”
• Staff writer Mike Glenn and special correspondent Seth Frantzman contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports. Mr. Frantzman reported from the Israeli city of Sderot.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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