Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories - Israel’s military on Friday said it was conducting raids backed by air strikes in northern Gaza, killing “dozens” of militants in an area where it had declared the command structure of Hamas dismantled months ago. The operation in Shujaiya, on the edge of Gaza City, caused numerous casualties, witnesses and medics said on Thursday when it began. Renewed fighting in Gaza’s north followed comments on Sunday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he said the “intense phase” of the war was winding down after almost nine months.
Experts say they foresee a potentially prolonged next phase. Omer Dostri, a military expert at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said he expects the army to reduce its ground presence and to increasingly use drones and fighter jets “to further dismantle Hamas”.
On Friday in the Shujaiya area, an AFP correspondent witnessed an air strike and saw smoke rising. Artillery fire boomed.
In a statement, Israel’s military said that, overnight Thursday, troops “started to conduct targeted raids” in the Shujaiya area as part of an operation that began earlier in the day. Intelligence had indicated “the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the area of Shujaiya”, the military said, in its first details of the operation. As troops went in, warplanes struck dozens of Hamas targets, it said, following other “significant” strikes that killed “dozens” of militants in the north.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Quds Brigades, said on Friday it was fighting in the northern Gaza neighbourhood of Shujaiya and had targeted Israeli troops with mortar shells. Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces had targeted the agency’s headquarters while advancing in western Rafah. Multiple agency staff were wounded, while two fire engines, an ambulance and an excavator used for rescuing people from under rubble were damaged, one of the agency’s officials Mohammad al-Mughair told AFP.
‘Significant strikes’
On Thursday, a military spokesman told residents and displaced Gazans in a social media message to leave “for your safety”.
They were asked to head south, to a declared “humanitarian zone” about 25 kilometres (15 miles) away. An AFP photographer saw many Palestinians leaving on foot, carrying their belongings through rubble-strewn streets.
Hamas said Israeli forces were “starting a ground incursion”, reporting “several” dead as “thousands flee under relentless bombing”. The war started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures. The militants also seized hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza although the army says 42 are dead. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,765 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
On Friday the military announced the death of another soldier, aged 19, during combat in southern Gaza. This brings to 314 the number killed since ground operations began in the territory.
Elsewhere in the coastal strip, paramedics on Friday reported three people killed in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.
AFP images showed the municipal building had been destroyed.
Colleagues prayed over the bodies of four civil defence volunteers killed during bombardment of the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp, other AFP images showed.
Orange work vests lay on top of their white-shrouded bodies.
Witnesses on Friday reported artillery fire in Nuseirat.
