Israel says it is poised to move on Rafah

Israel's military is poised to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and assault Hamas hold-outs in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defence official said on Wednesday, despite international warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe.

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government said Israel was "moving ahead" with a ground operation, but gave no timeline.

The defence official said Israel's Defence Ministry had bought 40,000 tents, each with the capacity for 10 to 12 people, to house Palestinians relocated from Rafah in advance of an assault.

Video circulating online appeared to show rows of square white tents going up in Khan Younis, a city some 5 km (3 miles) from Rafah. Reuters could not verify the video but reviewed images from satellite company Maxar Technologies which showed tent camps on Khan Younis land that had been vacant weeks ago.

An Israeli government source said Netanyahu's war cabinet planned to meet in the coming two weeks to authorise civilian evacuations, expected to take around a month.

The defence official, who requested anonymity, told Reuters that the military could go into action immediately but was awaiting a green light from Netanyahu.

Rafah, which abuts the Egyptian border, is sheltering more than a million Palestinians who fled the half-year-old Israeli offensive through the rest of Gaza and say the prospect of fleeing yet again is terrifying.

"I have to make a decision whether to leave Rafah because my mother and I are afraid an invasion could happen suddenly and we won't get time to escape," said Aya, 30, who has been living temporarily in the city with her family in a school.

She said that some families recently moved to a refugee camp in coastal Al-Mawasi, but their tents caught fire when tank shells landed nearby. "Where do we go?"

HITTING HARD

Israel, which launched its war to annihilate Hamas after the Islamist group's Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli towns, says Rafah is home to four Hamas combat battalions reinforced by thousands of retreating fighters, and it must defeat them to achieve victory.

"Hamas was hit hard in the northern sector. It was also hit hard in the centre of the Strip. And soon it will be hit hard in Rafah, too," Brigadier-General Itzik Cohen, commander of Israel's 162nd Division operating in Gaza, told Kan public TV.

But Israel's closest ally Washington has called on it to set aside plans for an assault, and says Israel can combat Hamas fighters there by other means.

"We could not support a Rafah ground operation without an appropriate, credible, executable humanitarian plan precisely because of the complications for delivery of assistance," David Satterfield, US special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issued, told reporters on Tuesday.

"We continue discussions with Israel on what we believe are alternate ways of addressing a challenge which we recognise, which is Hamas military present in Rafah."

Egypt says it will not allow Gazans to be pushed across the border onto its territory. Cairo had warned Israel against moving on Rafah, which "would lead to massive human massacres, losses (and) widespread destruction", its State Information Service said.

Three Egyptian security sources said that military and security coordination between Egypt and Israel over any Israeli incursion into Rafah did not mean approval of it.

Egypt welcomed the return of Palestinians northwards from Rafah, believing it to be in the interest of the population despite also serving Israeli plans to besiege Hamas in Rafah, the sources added.

Israel has withdrawn most of its ground troops from southern Gaza this month but kept up air strikes and conducted raids into areas its troops abandoned. Efforts by the United States, Egypt and Qatar to broker an extended ceasefire in time to head off an assault on Rafah have so far failed.

Gaza medical officials say than 34,000 people have been killed in Israel's military campaign, with thousands more bodies feared buried under rubble.

Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted 253 on Oct 7, according to Israeli tallies. Of those hostages, 129 remain in Gaza, Israeli officials say. More than 260 Israeli troops have been killed in ground fighting since Oct 20, the military says.

HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow in international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said he expected the assault on Rafah "sooner rather than later" because Netanyahu is under pressure to meet his stated objectives of rescuing hostages and killing all the Hamas leaders.

"The invasion of Rafah is unavoidable because of the way he has framed all of this," he said. But it will not be possible for everyone to leave the city, so "if he sends the military into Rafah, there are going to be a lot of casualties".

HAMAS RELEASES HOSTAGE VIDEO

At the opposite end of the Gaza Strip in the north, the city of Beit Lahiya came under massive shelling for a second day on Wednesday, a day after the Israeli military ordered residents out of four districts declared a "dangerous combat zone".

Israel said its operations there targeted areas from where the armed wing of Hamas-aligned Islamic Jihad fired rockets at two Israeli border settlements on Tuesday.

Israel has said it will eradicate Hamas following the militant group's rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 people were killed and 253 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Hamas released a video on Wednesday that apparently showed Israeli American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, alive. His father, Jonathan Polin, urged leaders to reach a ceasefire deal.

"We're relieved to see him alive but we're also concerned about his health and wellbeing as well as that of all of the other hostages and all of those suffering in this region," his father said in a video message.

The war, now in its seventh month, has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities. The offensive has laid to waste much of the enclave, displacing most of its 2.3 million people and creating a humanitarian crisis.

In the past 24 hours, Israeli strikes have killed at least 79 Palestinians and wounded 86, the Gaza Health Ministry said.

In the US, protests, some broken up by police, against Israel's campaign in Gaza are spreading on college campuses, as are concerns about Jewish students facing intimidation or antisemitism.

Democratic US President Joe Biden, who seeks re-election in November, has seen his stalwart backing of Israel erode support among Democratic voters.

Asked about the protests, the White House walked a careful line on Wednesday. Biden's press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president believes free speech and nondiscrimination are important on college campuses and students should feel safe.

Residents in the north of Gaza, many of whom have started to return to homes abandoned in the first phase of the war, on Wednesday described some of the most intense bombing since the war's early weeks.

"We don't know why this is all happening. Is it because ... we finally got some aid through after months of starvation, and the Israelis didn't like that?" said Mohammad Jamal, 29, a resident of Gaza City.

In Washington, Sullivan said the US has seen a marked increase in aid reaching Gaza and especially vulnerable north Gaza since Biden and Netanyahu spoke on April 4. Sullivan said the aid flow needed to increase further, a repeated US demand.

The comment came after U.N. aid agency UNRWA said on Tuesday that the number of relief trucks entering the enclave had reached the highest point so far in the conflict.

In the Nasser hospital complex, the main medical facility in the south, authorities said they had recovered more bodies from a mass grave, taking the total to 334.

Palestinians say Israeli troops buried corpses there with bulldozers to cover up crimes. The Israeli military denies this although it says its troops dug up some bodies at the site and reburied them after testing to make sure no hostages were there.