The Israeli Army made a brief tank attack in the northern Gaza Strip ahead of the “next stages of combat” against the Islamist group Hamas, a military spokesman reported on Thursday, a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed that his troops will conduct a “ground intervention” in the Palestinian enclave.
“Throughout the night, the Israel Defense Forces carried out targeted raids on tanks in the northern Gaza Strip as part of preparations for the next stages of combat,” the military spokesman said.
In the operation, “the soldiers found and attacked many terrorist infrastructures and anti-tank missile launch sites,” he explained.
Israeli forces “moved to prepare the battlefield” and “left the area at the end of the event,” he stressed.
Since Israel declared war on Hamas on October 7, following a massive attack by the Islamist group that left more than 1,400 dead, Israeli troops have been on the force. short cliffs of land to the north of the Strip as they continued their constant bombardment that left over 6,500 dead in the enclave.
On their side, the Palestinian militias in Gaza continued launching rockets towards various points in Israeli territory until Wednesday night, and for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, towards the city of Eilat, in the extreme south of Israel.
On Wednesday night, Netanyahu also confirmed in a televised speech that “something is going to happen in the intervention on the ground in Gaza” and that “they are working around the clock” in the preparations, in coordination with the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, and the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi.
“I will not give details of when, how, and how much, nor will I specify the various considerations that we take into account, many of which are unknown to the people of Israel, which is positive because we want to protect the lives of our soldiers announced.
On the other hand, the president of Israel repeated the order to all civilians in Gaza to leave the north of the Strip, even though there are no security conditions for this.
More than a million Palestinians, half the population of the Gaza Strip, have been displaced to the south, where there is constant shelling by Israeli forces, amid a humanitarian crisis unprecedented since Israel’s total cutoff of water, food, medicine, electricity, and fuel.
Many Gazans are unwilling or unable to evacuate because of sick or disabled family members, while many hospitals have been crushed, and they could not take care of more than 17,000 wounded, most of them children, women, and the elderly because the humanitarian aid that entered the border of Egypt was not enough.
