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Both Israel and Hamas reported fierce battles in the north of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, as Palestinians said Israeli tanks were approaching the territory’s main city from multiple directions.
The intensified fighting around Gaza City, which Israel says is Hamas’s command hub, came as the UN warned that the Mediterranean enclave was becoming a “living hell”.
The Israeli military said troops were “conducting fierce battles” against Hamas militants “deep in the Gaza Strip” and were operating across the north of the enclave, attacking Hamas “on the ground and from the air”.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who this week rejected calls for a ceasefire and said it was “a time for war”, said the Israel Defense Forces had struck about 300 targets in 24 hours, including anti-tank missile and rocket-launch posts and military compounds inside underground tunnels.
Israel has been reluctant to provide specifics about the extent of its invasion, which began on Friday.
But officials in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group, told the Financial Times that tens of Israeli tanks had been trying to advance under air cover in north-west Gaza and south of Gaza City amid bitter fighting.
The Hamas-controlled interior ministry in Gaza said Israeli forces had reached the Karama area to the north of Gaza City and had tanks on Salah al-Din street, the main inland north-south axis in the enclave.
Hamas said it had attacked two Israeli tanks and bulldozers in north-west Gaza and Israeli infantry troops near the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south of the strip. It added that Israel was “trying to separate the north of Gaza from its south”.
Unicef, the UN’s children’s fund, said on Tuesday that the enclave had become “a graveyard for thousands of children”, and a “living hell for everyone else”. It added that Gaza was now providing only 5 per cent of its normal output of water and that infant deaths because of dehydration were a growing threat.
More than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of the strip, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.
More than 1,400 people died in Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war, according to Israeli officials.
In a sign of the risk of the conflict spreading across the region, the Israeli military said on Tuesday it had intercepted a surface-to-surface missile fired towards the southern city of Eilat “from the area of the Red Sea”.
The Houthis, an Iran-aligned rebel movement that controls northern Yemen, later said they had launched a “large number of missiles and drones” on Israeli targets.
They added that it was their third such attack and that they would conduct others, calling on “the Arab and Islamic peoples [to] come to the aid of Gaza and its children and women”.
The IDF said there had been “no threat or risk to civilians”.
An IDF official added that it was the first use of the country’s “Arrow” aerial defence system since the beginning of the war. Earlier this month, the US shot down 15 drones and four cruise missiles fired by the Houthis and headed towards Israel.
A senior UN official also warned this week that the war’s “spillover into Syria . . . has already begun”.
Addressing the Security Council, Geir Pedersen, the UN envoy for Syria, pointed to recent air strikes on airports in Aleppo and Damascus, widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli forces. He also noted retaliation by the US for what it said were multiple attacks on its forces “by groups that it claims are backed by Iran, including on Syrian territory”.
In addition, the Israel-Hamas conflict has led to a flare-up in hostilities on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where IDF forces have been engaged in escalating cross-border fire with the Iran-backed militant group Hizbollah in recent weeks.
Additional reporting by Samer Al-Atrush, Raya Jalabi and Simeon Kerr
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