Israeli forces enter southern Gaza
Global concern growing over civilian casualties
Israel moved ground forces into southern Gaza in its war on Hamas, witnesses said Monday, despite global concern over mounting civilian deaths and fears the conflict would spread in the Middle East.
Israel ordered people out of swathes of the main southern city in the besieged strip as it pressed its ground campaign deep into the south, sending desperate residents fleeing even as it dropped bombs on areas where it told them to go.
According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry on Sunday, 15,523 people had died in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war with Israel on October 7.
Seventy percent of the Palestinians killed in the war were women and children, ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said, adding that 41,316 people had been wounded.
Germany urged Israel on Monday to guarantee “realistic” protection to civilians with its Foreign Ministry spokesman saying, “Something we expect from Israel is that they not only urge civilians to leave the danger zone, but that they are in a realistic position to find safe shelter elsewhere”.
“Too many civilians have already been killed in this war,” Sebastian Fischer said.
On Monday, dozens of Israeli tanks as well as armored personnel carriers and bulldozers entered the south of the territory near the city of Khan Yunis, which is crowded with internally displaced Palestinians, witnesses told AFP.
‘Unconditional
support to kill babies’
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that the Western nations supporting Israel were giving it “unconditional support to kill babies” and were complicit in its crimes.
In a speech to an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) committee meeting in Istanbul, Erdogan said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would eventually be tried as a war criminal over the ongoing offensive in Gaza.
“Beyond being a war criminal, Netanyahu will be tried as the butcher of Gaza, just as Milosevic was tried,” Erdogan said, in reference to Yugoslav ex-president Slobodan Milosevic, who was tried for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes at a tribunal in The Hague.
“Those who try to skip over the deaths of all those innocent people by using the excuse of Hamas have nothing left to say to humanity,” he added, referring to Western powers, which he said were “blind and deaf”.
Commercial ships hit
Despite global fears that the conflict will spread elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel has widened its offensive in Gaza.
On Sunday, ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthis struck three commercial ships in the Red Sea, while a US warship shot down three drones in self-defense during the hours-long assault, the US military said. The Houthis claimed two of the attacks.
The strikes marked an escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Gaza war, as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict. The US vowed to “consider all appropriate responses” in the wake of the attack.
“These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security,” the US military’s Central Command said in a statement. “They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world.”
Intolerable suffering
Full-scale fighting in Gaza resumed Friday after the collapse of a week-long truce brokered by Qatar, the United States and Egypt, during which Israel and Hamas had exchanged scores of POWs and prisoners.
Air strikes have since intensified in Gaza’s south, said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.
“Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured,” he posted Monday on X.
“Somehow, it’s getting worse for children and mothers.”
The Red Cross president, who arrived in war-torn Gaza on Monday, called for the protection of civilians in the Palestinian territory, where she warned that human suffering was “intolerable”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said ICRC president Mirjana Spoljaric’s travel to the region would happen in several stages with “a visit to Israel expected over the coming weeks”.
“I have arrived in Gaza, where people’s suffering is intolerable,” Spoljaric said on X, formerly Twitter.
“It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible,” she added in an ICRC statement.