As the Israeli army continues to engage militants in Khan Younis in house-to-house fighting and inside the Hamas tunnel network, Israeli military sources said 18 of the 22 Hamas brigades have already been destroyed and within one week the army should be in full control of Gaza’s second largest city, where Israel believes the Hamas leaders are hiding, surrounded by hostages.
The military have completed plans to extend the fighting southwards, to Rafah on the Egyptian border, but such a manoeuvre could endanger the more than one million Gaza residents who fled to the area to escape the fighting.
Defence minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday that the fate of the militants in Rafah will be the same as those in Khan Younis. “Surrender or death: there is no third option,” he said.
Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu told parliamentarians from his ruling Likud party on Monday that the war in Gaza cannot end before the Hamas leadership is killed – a goal that will take “months and not years”.
[ Netanyahu’s bind: Compromising in Gaza or holding on to power at homeOpens in new window ]
More than 27,000 people have been killed in the fighting in Gaza. Israel says 1,200 were killed in southern Israel in the October 7th Hamas surprise attack. 253 civilians and soldiers were seized and taken into captivity in Gaza. 136 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom Israel believes at least 29 are dead.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday, his first stop in a regional trip aimed at clinching a ceasefire and hostage release deal. He hopes that normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel will be one of the elements in a wider deal to break the diplomatic deadlock.
A truce has already been discussed in detail by US, Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials but Hamas has still not forwarded its response, with reports of differences between the leadership in Gaza and Hamas leaders in exile.
This is Mr Blinken’s fifth trip to the region since the start of the Gaza war and he is also set to visit Egypt, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank in the coming days.
The Red Cross said more humanitarian aid is desperately needed in the coastal enclave, where more than 1.8 million residents have been displaced.
Israeli foreign minister Yisrael Katz welcomed the United Nations’ decision to establish a committee to investigate the allegations that 12 Gazans employed by the UNRWA refugee agency took part in the October 7th Hamas attack.
“We will submit all evidence highlighting UNRWA’s ties to terrorism and its harmful effects on regional stability,” he said.
UNRWA claimed on Monday that an aid lorry waiting to carry food into Gaza was hit by Israeli naval gunfire. A photograph showed a large hole in the side of the vehicle and damaged aid containers. UNRWA stressed that it “cannot deliver humanitarian aid under fire”.
The US is also engaged in a diplomatic push to end the fighting between Israel and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah in south Lebanon, where the danger of a miscalculation by either side could plummet the region into a full-scale war. US envoy Amos Hochstein is talking to both sides about a deal that will entail a withdrawal of Hizbullah gunmen from the border, the deployment of a larger number of Unifil and Lebanese army troops and a return of Israeli civilians to border communities that were evacuated.
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