The decision has also deepened tensions with President Biden and ramped up pressure from Israeli society critical of efforts to free hostages held in Gaza.
Israel describes the southern Gazan city of Rafah as the stronghold of the last pieces of Hamas’s conventional army, and it sees the border area with Egypt as a loose sieve where weapons and supplies flow freely to Hamas.
Biden has said he has a red line against an Israeli military operation in Rafah that causes wide-scale destruction and death for Palestinian civilians. But the administration, so far, has not described growing Israeli military operations in the southern Gaza Strip as crossing the threshold of wide-scale warfare.
The Israeli military has increased the number of troops present in and around Rafah over two weeks since the start of operations in earnest, said Seth Frantzman, an Israel-based adjunct fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies based in Washington.
“They’re basically moving along this very narrow area of land that is along the Gaza-Egypt border, which is about 8 miles of border, and I think they’ve taken about 50 percent of it,” he said.
But the vast majority of the international community and humanitarian groups are raising alarm that Israel’s ongoing military operations are putting at risk nearly 1 million Palestinians, displaced multiple times, and that humanitarian assistance deliveries have yet to scale up enough to meet the needs of the people.
“The claim that people in Gaza can move to ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones is false. Each time, it puts the lives of civilians at serious risk,” Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general for the legacy agency that provides relief for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, posted on the social platform X.
He warned that 800,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis.
“Gaza does not have any safe zones. No place is safe. No one is safe,” he said.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a ruling Friday for Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah amid concern of acts of genocide occurring against the Palestinians.
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
