Middle East Crisis: Israel Says It Will Send More Troops to Rafah, Defying International Pressure (2024)

The announcement suggests that Israel plans to push deeper into Rafah.

“Hundreds of targets have already been attacked,” Mr. Gallant said after meeting with commanders in the Rafah area. “This operation will continue.”

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the city in recent days, many of whom have had to move repeatedly over seven months of an unrelenting war, U.N. officials say.

Until now, Israeli troops and tanks have made only a limited incursion into eastern Rafah, and on May 7 they seized the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, a vital entry point for aid. The crossing remains shuttered, leaving wounded and ill people who need treatment abroad with no way out, and hundreds of aid trucks piling up in Egypt.

Diplomats and Palestinian officials have said the army’s operations in and around the crossing and nearby clashes between soldiers and Hamas fighters have created a dangerous environment for humanitarian workers.

Mr. Gallant, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, also said Israeli troops had destroyed tunnels in Rafah. Two Israeli officials said a key objective of the operation was to demolish tunnels between Egypt and Gaza that have allowed Hamas to replenish its weapons supply over the years.

Egypt and Israel maintain a decades-old peace treaty and close security cooperation, but Israel’s invasion of Rafah has tested the sensitive relationship.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly spoken of the need to destroy Hamas’s battalions in Rafah. In recent days, some Hamas militants have fled the city, according to four Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.

The fighters have headed northward alongside civilians, the officials said. While it was unclear how many militants escaped, their flight underscored that at least some would be left unscathed by Israel’s invasion of the city.

Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.

Families who fled Israel’s offensive find refuge but little else in Khan Younis.

Mr. Abu Tueima, a taxi driver before the war, said that being displaced so many times had left them exhausted and without support. Aside from what the occasional aid truck can bring, few relief supplies, including food or tents, have been made available to the thousands of Palestinians who have fled to Khan Younis over the past week and a half, since the Rafah operation began.

“No one here helped us with anything,” Mr. Abu Tueima said, beginning to break down in tears.

“Life here is not fair at all for us; we want to live in peace like others,” he said. “In Rafah, people and charities offered us a little money, but here, not one single person asked about us. No one even cares about all of those children and women here.”

Israel’s offensive in Rafah has stopped nearly all aid from getting through the two main border crossings in southern Gaza. The United Nations’ World Food Program warned on Wednesday that its food and fuel stocks would run out in a matter of days, saying in a statement that “the threat of famine in Gaza never loomed larger.”

The agency also said it had difficulty reaching its main warehouse in Rafah because of the Israeli offensive and fighting in the area.

Fuel in Gaza has been in short supply ever since Israel announced a “complete siege” of the territory on Oct. 9, two days after the Hamas-led attack. The lack of fuel has threatened the operation of trucks, hospitals, generators, sewage pumping plants, desalination systems and other basic services for 2.2 million people.

At least 600,000 people have fled Rafah in just the last week, according to the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA. Another 100,000 have been displaced from their homes and shelters in northern Gaza amid renewed evacuation orders from the Israeli military, which said it was engaged in intense fighting with Hamas fighters who had returned to the area.

In Khan Younis, “no one is distributing anything, no one is helping, nothing enters to help the people,” said Mohammed Aborjela, who arrived from Rafah days ago. The few goods arriving in the city on commercial trucks are being sold at high prices, he said.

The 27-year-old, a project coordinator with a development organization, said that Palestinians fleeing Rafah and other areas were paying hundreds of dollars for transportation on the backs of trucks and donkey carts, leaving them little money to pay for food or tents, which sell for at least 1,000 shekels (about $270) and as much as twice that.

“People don’t have this money,” he said. “People are sleeping in the streets waiting for aid groups to come and help them build a tent.”

The Tueima family fled Rafah a week ago and managed to bring only blankets and clothes. They had to pay 250 shekels for a van to transport them from the embattled city to the U.N. school in Khan Younis where they are now sheltering.

His wife, Najah Abu Tueima, 42, miscarried with twins days into the war after the family was forced under bombardment to flee its home near the Israeli border.

“We are here on our own,” Ms. Abu Tueima said. “I’m fed up and over-exhausted with the repeated evacuation journeys and suffering.”

The Arab League calls for U.N. peacekeepers to be deployed in Gaza and the West Bank.

It’s unlikely that U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed to Gaza and the West Bank in the near future because sending U.N. peacekeepers into any conflict requires first the authorization of the Council. U.N. forces, which are typically drawn from the armed forces of multiple countries, do not enter live battle zones and do not engage in fighting. Both Israel and Hamas would also have to agree to having U.N. peacekeepers on the ground.

“There first has to be peace to keep,” Mr. Haq said. “We don’t go into active combat, and parties themselves have to agree on allowing the presence of peacekeepers. We don’t go in as an enemy force or an occupying force.”

The proposal came as part of a final statement issued by the league after its 22 members met on Thursday in Manama, Bahrain, a summit dominated by discussion about the war in Gaza.

In addition to calling for an immediate cease-fire and accusing Israel of obstructing those efforts, the Arab League called for “the deployment of United Nations international protection and peacekeeping forces in the occupied Palestinian territory until the two-state solution is implemented.”

The United Nations, Mr. Haq said, would be willing to take other measures called for by the Arab League, such as hosting or leading a conference toward peace and cease-fire in the conflict. But no definite plans have been discussed yet, he said.

Asked whether the United States would support the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers, a State Department spokesman, Vedant Patel, told reporters in Washington that bringing in “additional security forces” could potentially compromise Israel’s campaign to dismantle Hamas.

The Arab League’s statement, reported in Bahrain’s state news media, also reiterated the group’s position that a two-state solution should be based on the borders that were in place before the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The group said that the Council should not only take “clear measures” toward implementing such a solution but also establish a time limit for doing so.

In an address to the summit on Thursday, António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said that a two-state solution was “the only permanent way to end the cycle of violence and instability.”

“The war in Gaza is an open wound that threatens to infect the entire region,” Mr. Guterres said, adding that “nothing” could justify the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel or the “collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

The Arab League’s call for U.N. peacekeepers came amid fervent debate over how Gaza should be governed after the war. Negotiations over a cease-fire have been complicated by Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah. They were already stalled by staunch disagreements between Israel and Hamas over how long a truce should last and the terms of an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Satellite images show widening destruction as Israeli forces push closer to central Rafah.

Collapsed buildings and debris are seen throughout this neighborhood, where only limited damage was visible before Israel started its incursion last week.

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Source: Satellite imagery from Planet Labs

While it is not possible to know exactly what caused the damage in areas throughout Rafah, much of what is seen is consistent with the aftermath of Israeli bombardment and ground operations elsewhere in Gaza since the war began last October.

Israel says Rafah is Hamas’s last stronghold, and a critical gateway for arms shipments smuggled into Gaza from Egypt. It says it is determined to make sure the militants who were behind the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel no longer pose a threat.

But Rafah has also been a refuge for more than a million Palestinians who fled Israeli bombardment in other parts of Gaza. The United Nations says that hundreds of thousands of people have fled Rafah in recent days, and the imagery indicates that large numbers of people are leaving the center of Rafah, even in areas outside of evacuation orders the Israeli military has issued for the city.

Areas of Rafah that were full of tents and vehicles just a week ago appeared empty on Wednesday.

Christoph Koettl contributed reporting.

The U.S. military installs a temporary pier in Gaza for humanitarian aid.

Israel has long opposed a seaport for Gaza, saying it would pose a security threat. As the humanitarian crisis in the territory has spiraled in recent months, with severe shortages of food, medicine and other basic needs, the U.S. military in March announced a plan to build a temporary pier to enable aid shipments via the Mediterranean Sea.

An American ship loaded with humanitarian aid, the Sagamore, set off for Gaza from Cyprus last week, and the aid was loaded onto a smaller vessel that had been waiting for the pier to be installed. The United Nations will receive the aid and oversee its distribution in Gaza, according to Central Command, which said no U.S. troops would set foot in the territory.

Over the next two days, the U.S. military and humanitarian groups will aim to load three to five trucks from the pier and send them into Gaza as a test of the process laid out by the Pentagon, said General Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“It’ll probably take another 24 hours to make sure everything is set up,” he told reporters on Thursday aboard a flight to Brussels, where he was attending a NATO meeting. “We have our force protection that’s been put in place, we have contract truck drivers on the other side and there’s fuel for those truck drivers as well.”

The Pentagon hopes the pier operation will bring in enough aid for around 90 trucks a day, a number that will increase to 150 trucks when the system reaches full operating capacity, officials say.

In a briefing on Thursday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said supporting the temporary pier project was a “top priority.” He said the Israeli Navy and the 99th Division were supporting the effort by sea and by land, respectively.

Aid groups say the devastation in Gaza after seven months of Israeli bombardment, strict Israeli inspections and restrictions on crossing points are limiting the amount of aid that can enter Gaza. Israel has maintained that the restrictions are necessary to ensure that neither weapons nor supplies fall into the hands of Hamas.

In a briefing on Wednesday, Dan Dieckhaus, a director for the U.S. Agency for International Development, stressed that the maritime aid corridor was meant to supplement deliveries through land crossings, not replace them.

The Pentagon has said that the pier could help deliver as many as two million meals a day.

An aid group, World Central Kitchen, built a makeshift jetty in mid-March to deliver aid by sea to Gaza for the first time in nearly two decades. But those efforts came to an abrupt stop in early April after seven of the group’s workers were killed in an Israeli strike.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

The top U.N. court hears new arguments from South Africa on Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“It has become increasingly clear that Israel’s actions in Rafah are part of the end game in which Gaza is utterly destroyed as an area capable of human habitation,” Vaughan Lowe, a British lawyer, told the court. “This is the last step in the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian people.”

Mr. Lowe was part of the South African legal team that presented its case over two hours on Thursday.

South Africa’s filings said the rights of Palestinians in Gaza were under threat, adding that Israel’s control over two major border crossings in southern Gaza — at Rafah and at Kerem Shalom — put at extreme risk the flow of humanitarian supplies into Gaza and the ability for hospitals there to function.

“It is difficult to imagine such a situation could get worse, but, unfortunately, it has,” John Dugard, another member of the South African team, told the court.

Several members of the team addressed the court in an attempt to build their case, quoting frequently from warnings by senior United Nations officials that an assault on Rafah would worsen conditions for civilians and the enclave’s hunger crisis.

One member of South African legal team, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, quoted statements by senior Israeli officials that he said showed an intent to destroy Gaza as a whole and not simply Hamas, the country’s stated enemy.

The legal team also asked the court to order Israel to facilitate access to Gaza for aid workers, investigators, fact-finding missions and journalists.

One of the lawyers, Adila Hassim, showed the court a photo of shattered buildings in Khan Younis, a city north of Rafah, to illustrate the devastation caused by Israel’s military in Gaza as a whole. Ms. Hassim appeared to be on the verge of tears as she described the deaths of children in the military campaign.

Israel has vehemently denied South Africa’s claims, repeating that it has placed no restrictions on the amount of aid entering the enclave and that it has taken steps recently to ramp up the amount of food and other supplies going in, including opening two crossing points in northern Gaza.

Israel has also said that its latest assault on eastern Rafah was a “precise operation” targeting only members of Hamas, the terrorist group that led the Oct. 7 attacks, which Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,200 Israelis and led to the capture of about 250 others.

Israel is expected to make its defense before the court on Friday. Gilad Noam, Israel’s deputy attorney general for international law, is among the officials in the Israeli delegation who are expected to address the court. It was not clear when the court would issue a decision, but given that South Africa said on Thursday that its petition was extremely urgent because an assault on Rafah was ongoing, it appeared possible that a ruling could come soon.

The hearings are part of South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, which it filed in December. In late January, the court ordered Israel to do more to prevent acts of genocide, but it stopped short of calling for a cease-fire. The main case, dealing with the accusation of genocide, is not expected to start until next year.

The court, established by the founding charter of the United Nations in 1945, was created to settle disputes between member states. It has no means of enforcing its orders, but the South Africa case has contributed to the international pressure on Israel to rein in its campaign in Gaza.

Marlise Simons and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

Iraqi groups close to Iran are joining in strikes on Israel.

These attacks, much like those launched by Hamas, Hezbollah and by other Iranian-backed groups, are intercepted by Israel or fail en route.

The most recent attack occurred early Thursday and was aimed at Eilat, where Israel has a naval base and at an oil refinery in Haifa, according to a statement from the Iraqi Resistance groups.

The Israeli military has not commented publicly on the strikes, although it sometimes notes — as it did in a Telegram post on May 15 — that it has intercepted missiles or drones coming “from the east toward Israeli territory.”

Since the Israeli military is not commenting on the attacks, it is difficult to know how many have been blocked by Israel’s multilayered missile defense.

“These drones and cruise missiles coming from Iraq and eastern Syria have very long journeys, and the Israelis have ample time and opportunity to intercept over Syria or over Iraq and Jordan,” said Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research institute.

On May 9, the Israeli military appears to have struck back, destroying a building used by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, according to reports from the Syrian Defense Ministry. The ministry said it had shot down some Israeli missiles launched from the Golan Heights toward the southern area of the Syrian capital, Damascus, where the building was.

In a statement, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq denounced the Israeli attack, calling it “a treacherous targeting of a cultural and media building” by the “usurping Zionist entity” and pledging revenge.

The Iraqi Resistance is made up of a number of armed groups, most prominently Kata’ib Hezbollah, Harakat al Nujaba and Sayyid al Shuhada. The last one appears not to have participated in the recent attacks on Israel.

The Iraqi groups’ strikes started in November, a month after the war between Israel and Hamas began, but there were only a few at first, according to the Washington Institute’s calendar of attacks by Iraqi armed groups linked to Iran.

In February, after the Iraqi Resistance was persuaded to halt its attacks on U.S. military camps and installations in Iraq and Syria, the number of strikes on Israel rose quickly. In total, the Iraqi Resistance groups have announced carrying out more than 70 attacks since the beginning of the war in Gaza, with most occurring in 2024.

A senior member of Kata’ib Hezbollah said in an interview that while the group’s drones and al-Arqab missiles from Iraq and Syria hit their targets only some of the time and that Israel can intercept rockets, the very fact of using them sends a message “that we will reach them soon.”

In the context of all the attacks on Israel, the number launched by Iraqi groups remains relatively low, but they are still destabilizing, said Shaan Shaikh, the deputy director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“It’s certainly harassment,” he said, “and it presents a threat of escalation. If one gets through and hurts or kills someone, it would almost certainly result in an exchange of fire. And then you don’t know what could happen.”

5 Israeli soldiers were killed by gunfire from their own tanks, the military says.

“There was an incident of friendly fire — five soldiers were killed,” he said, adding, “The incident is under review.”

The Jerusalem Post reported that the men had been killed in Gaza City in the north of the territory, and that seven soldiers had also been wounded when two tanks opened fire. The Israeli military later named the five, who were from the Paratroopers Brigade, on its website.

The bulk of Israeli forces began a withdrawal from northern Gaza earlier this year, with Israel saying it had defeated Hamas battalions in the area. But in recent weeks Israeli troops have returned to the north, including Gaza City, to battle fighters from Hamas they said have regrouped.

About 278 Israeli soldiers have died in Gaza since the start of the military offensive more than seven months ago, the military has said. It said in December that one-fifth of the 105 soldiers who had been killed to that point had died in accidents and that, of those deaths, 13 were the result of friendly fire.