Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday, February 10, 2024, that he has ordered the military to develop a dual plan to evacuate civilians from Rafah and to defeat the remaining Hamas battalions.
Netanyahu said that a “massive operation” is needed in Rafah.
Close to 1,700,000 Palestinians – more than half of the Gaza Strip’s population – have crammed into Rafah after fleeing fighting elsewhere in the strip.
Many of the displaced Palestinians sheltering there first arrived after the Israeli military instructed them to flee south for safety.
However, Israel says that after more than four months of war, Rafah is the last remaining Hamas stronghold in Gaza.
Netanyahu said in the statement that it is impossible to achieve the war goals without dismantling Hamas in Rafah, and that an operation like this, with its intensity, scale and size, is going to require the evacuation of civilians in Rafah.
“It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas by leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah,” Netanyahu’s office said.
It added that Netanyahu had ordered the military and security officials to come up with a “combined plan” that includes both a mass evacuation of civilians and the destruction of Hamas’ forces in the town.
he announcement came after heavy international criticism, including from the U.S., of Israeli intentions to invade the crowded town on Egypt’s border.
Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, said Thursday that going ahead with such an offensive “with no planning and little thought in an area where there is sheltering of a million people would be a disaster.”
John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, said an Israel ground offensive in Rafah is “not something we would support.”
Israel already has begun to strike Rafah from the air. Airstrikes overnight and into Friday hit two residential buildings in Rafah,
International Community Urged To Help Halt Rafah Invasion
The Gaza-based rights group, Al-Mezan Center said that the international community must mobilise swiftly to stop an anticipated Israeli assault on Rafah.
The more than one million displaced Palestinians hemmed in Rafah have nowhere to flee.
“For months, Al-Mezan Center warned of Israel’s evacuation orders as a pretext to push Gaza’s population closer to the border with Egypt in preparation for their mass deportation,” the group said in a social media post.
It added, “Time is running out: the international community must act now to halt the ground invasion of Rafah.”
Similarly, Senior political analyst for a renowned news agency, Marwan Bishara said that Israel’s planned operation in Rafah has revived fears of forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and that countries, such as the United States, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, must exert all possible leverage to prevent the assault from moving forward.
“He [Netanyahu] is adamant about continuing to the southern tip of Gaza, where, as we’ve heard from our correspondent, over one million Palestinians are concentrated,” Bishara said.
“This means so many things can go wrong now, in terms of the mass massacre of people, or, what we’ve been fearing all along, not just a massacre of people but the expulsion of the Palestinians into the Sinai,” he added.
“This is the time for whoever has leverage, or for whoever cares, especially those in Washington, those in London, but also those in Riyadh and Cairo, to move now, before it’s too late,” he said.
Additionally, Sara Kira, Founder and Director at the European North African Centre for Research noted that if Israel starts bombarding Rafah, the people will have nowhere to go except for the Egyptian borders.
“And that’s crossing the Philadelphia axis which Egypt has declared as a red line because that might cause, again, military tension with Israel,” she said.
