Israel: We will expand ground operations. Communications blackout in Gaza

While intense bombing continues in the Gaza Strip, hit at night by an internet blackout, the Israeli army accuses Hamas of having its main operational base under the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the largest in the Strip, where thousands of people took refuge in these weeks of war. Accusations rejected by Hamas as “unfounded”. Meanwhile, anti-aircraft sirens sounded again in Tel Aviv and the center of the Jewish state and Israel warns that the armed forces have intensified air strikes in the Gaza Strip in recent hours and that ground forces will “expand” their activity tonight.

The Israeli army has released images showing what it says are Hamas structures under the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, a clinic that was submerged by thousands of patients and wounded and in which, according to UN data, tens of thousands of displaced people fled in search of shelter. “We have concrete evidence that hundreds of terrorists went to the hospital to hide after the massacres of October 7th,” said Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari in a briefing with foreign journalists. According to Israel, it is from the tunnels under the hospital that Hamas directs its attacks against the Jewish State. Hamas denies it and in fact denounces it: “These lies represent the prelude to a new massacre against our people, greater than the one at the al-Ahli Baptist hospital” on October 17, warns Izzat al-Rishq, member of the Hamas political cabinet. Palestinian group.

Meanwhile, in a sign of growing tension in the region, US fighter jets struck targets in eastern Syria that the Pentagon said were linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard; an attack that followed a series of attacks on US forces in the region last week. And in Egypt, in the Sinai peninsula, what according to Al Qahera News was a missile fell (others said it was a drone) and then a “strange object” that could be a drone: in the first case the Egyptian tourist city was hit by Taba, on the border with Israel, and 6 people were slightly injured; while in the second case the object landed near a power plant in the Egyptian Red Sea city of Nuweiba, not far from Taba. The Israeli army questioned Yemen: “In the last few hours an aerial threat has been detected in the Red Sea area,” he said. Last week, a US Navy destroyer in the Red Sea shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched at Israel by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Israel’s long-awaited ground operation in Gaza has not yet arrived, but on the night Between Thursday and Friday, Israeli tanks and soldiers carried out a new incursion into the Strip, before returning. With the intense airstrikes, the death toll continues to rise: according to Gaza authorities, it has risen to 7.

300 people died in the Strip, a number that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) defined as “credible” and to which must be added the at least a thousand organizations that, according to the WHO, are estimated to be under the rubble. Through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, another 10 trucks and also a delegation of 10 foreign doctors entered the Strip, but the head of UNRWA defined them as “just crumbs” for a population of more than 2 million people under siege total since October 9th. And the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights accused Israel of war crimes: “Collective punishment is a war crime” and “Israel’s collective punishment against the entire population of Gaza must cease immediately,” said the spokeswoman Shamdasani Ravine.