As violence increases in the West Bank, Israel vows to pursue military targets in Gaza

As the war in the Gaza Strip ended its third month on Sunda, with top diplomats touring the region to try to stem the spread of the conflict, Israel said it had broken up Hamas’s command structure in northern Gaza and indicated that it would not change its objective. of dismantling the group’s capabilities in the devastated area.

“The war must not be stopped until we achieve all its goals – eliminating Hamas, returning all our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again pose a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting. . His message, he said, was for “our enemies as well as our friends.”

Fears of a broader war have added urgency to visits to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles.

Early Sunday, even as diplomats tried to prevent the fighting from spreading more widely, a spike in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank left about a dozen people dead, including nine Palestinians, including a young child, an Israeli Border Police officer. and a man from East Jerusalem, officials said. Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, has also become a matter of increasing concern.

“We are intensely focused on preventing this conflict from spreading,” Mr. Blinken told reporters on Saturday, a day before he met King Abdullah II in Jordan. The king said he had warned the foreign minister of “catastrophic consequences” if the war continued.

Of increasing concern are clashes with Iranian allies: skirmishes with Hezbollah along the northern border with Lebanon and attacks on ships and missiles launched at Israel by Houthis in the Red Sea. In recent days, the United States has carried out attacks on militants in Iraq and Israel is believed to have carried out targeted assassinations in Syria and Lebanon.

Israel is under intense pressure from its allies, neighbors and world leaders to limit fighting in Gaza, where more than 22,000 people are believed to have been killed in the weeks since October 7, when a Hamas-led attack on Israel killed an estimated 1,200 people . and unleash war. When the conflict reached the three-month mark, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator made a plea for peace.

The Biden administration has pressured Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, where a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding since the war began in October. Mr. Blinken reinforced that message with a visit on Sunday to a warehouse holding boxes of canned food destined for Gaza. The much-needed supplies are being brought into the Palestinian enclave by truck as part of an aid operation organized by the United Nations World Food Program.

Sheri Ritsema-Anderson, the UN coordinator in Jordan, told reporters that in her 15 years of working in the Middle East she had never seen a humanitarian situation as dire as the one in Gaza, describing it as a ‘epic catastrophe’. About 220 trucks carrying various types of aid and fuel now enter Gaza every day, but that is only a fraction of the amount needed, she said.

“We continue to demand an immediate end to the war,” said UN official Martin Griffiths, “not only for the people of Gaza and its threatened neighbors, but for generations to come who will never forget these 90 days of hell. and of attacks on humanity’s most basic precepts.”

In the three months since the “horrific attacks of October 7,” he said, “Gaza has become a place of death and despair.”

Last weekend, the Israeli military offered the public a detailed presentation on the gains it said it had made against Hamas, but warned against unrealistic expectations. The military’s chief spokesman, Vice Admiral Daniel Hagari, said it remains committed to dismantling Hamas’ capabilities both above and below the ground, where the militants have an extensive network of tunnels. But achieving that goal, he warned, “will take time,” and he predicted fighting would continue into 2024.

Admiral Hagari said in a presentation broadcast on Israeli television and on the Internet on Saturday evening that the army had “completed the dismantling of the Hamas military framework” in the northern part of Gaza, where Israel began its ground invasion in late October.

But even with their command structure destroyed, Hamas fighters there are still engaged in skirmishes with Israeli fighters, the Israelis say.

“While Hamas’s ability to function in the north has indeed taken a hit, the country still has infrastructure above and below the ground, so it is still a combat zone,” said Gabi Siboni, colonel in the military reserves and member of the Conservative Party. the leaning Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.

Hamas, Colonel Siboni said, is “a difficult and determined enemy.”

“It will take time to completely dismantle it,” he said, adding that the fighting in the south is all the more complicated because of the density of the civilian population there. About a million Gazans moved south after the Israeli army ordered them to leave the north.

Nachman Shai, a former Israeli government minister and once its chief military spokesman, said Admiral Hagari’s presentation appeared intended in part to boost Israeli morale. “This is a very long war in Israeli terms,” Mr Shai said. He added that the presentation was “a way to encourage people. To say that we are achieving our goals, but it will take time, so please be patient with us.”

In the presentation, Admiral Hagari said that Hamas had maintained two military brigades with twelve battalions, numbering approximately 14,000 fighters, in the Jabaliya area of ​​northern Gaza. Israel found eight kilometers of tunnels in that area alone, he said. Hamas fighters there “now operate without a framework and without commanders” and are still able to launch sporadic rocket fire into Israel, he said.

The army announced in recent days that it would begin withdrawing several thousand troops from the Gaza Strip, at least temporarily. But what a next phase might look like remains unclear.

Amos Yadlin, former head of military intelligence and founder of MIND Israel, a research organization specializing in national security, outlined several possible scenarios in an article published Sunday on N12, a prominent Israeli news site.

One option for Israel, he wrote, would be to hold northern Gaza to prevent Hamas from re-establishing itself in that area and to use it as a bargaining chip for the return of the hostages while the remaining fighters emerge from the tunnels would be forced. over there. Another possibility, he said, would be to allow the gradual return of residents to the north, with the aim of establishing stability there and trying to turn it into a model for the eventual reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, even as fighting continues in the south.

On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike in the south killed two journalists, including Hamza al-Dahdouh, the son of Wael al-Dahdouh, a well-known Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera TV who has covered Gaza throughout his career. Wael al-Dahdouh had already lost his wife, another son, a daughter and a grandson in an Israeli airstrike in October.

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that an Israeli drone strike hit the car Hamza al-Dahdouh was driving, west of the southern town of Khan Younis. The other murdered journalist was Mustafa Thuraya.

“I wish that the blood of my son Hamza is the last of journalists and the last of people here in Gaza, and that this massacre stops,” Wael al-Dahdouh told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

At least 70 Palestinian journalists and media workers from Saturday had been killed in Gaza, some while reporting on the conflict, others while at home or sheltering with their families, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Vivian Yee And Andrés R. Martínez reporting contributed.