by JERUSALEM – As the war in the Gaza Strip ended its third month on Sunday, with top diplomats touring the region to try to stop the spread of the conflict, Israel said it had dismantled the Hamas command structure in northern Gaza and noted that wouldn’t change. its objective of dismantling the group’s capabilities throughout the devastated territory.
“The war must not stop until we achieve all its objectives: eliminate Hamas, return all our hostages and ensure that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting. . His message, he said, was intended “both for our enemies and our friends.”
Fears of a broader war have added urgency to visits to the region by US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles.
Early Sunday, as diplomats worked to prevent the fighting from spreading more widely, a surge in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank left about a dozen dead, including nine Palestinians, including a toddler and an Israeli border police officer. and a man from East Jerusalem, authorities said. Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, has also become a cause of growing concern.
“This is a moment of deep tension in the region,” Blinken said at a news conference in Doha, Qatar, where he traveled on Sunday after a stop in Jordan. “This is a conflict that could easily metastasize, causing even more insecurity and more suffering.”
“We are intensely focused on preventing this conflict from spreading,” Blinken told reporters on Saturday, a day before meeting King Abdullah II in Jordan. The king said he had warned the secretary of state of “catastrophic ramifications” if the war continued.
Clashes with proxies from Iran are increasingly worrying: skirmishes with Hezbollah along the northern border with Lebanon and attacks on ships and missiles launched against Israel by the Houthis in the Red Sea. In recent days, the United States has carried out attacks against militants in Iraq and Israel is alleged to have carried out targeted assassinations in Syria and Lebanon.
Israel is under great pressure from its allies, neighbors and world leaders to reduce the fighting in Gaza, where more than 22,000 people have been reported killed in the weeks since October 7, when a Hamas-led attack on Israel killed about 1,200 people. and unleashed the war.
The Biden administration has been pressing Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, where a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding since the start of the war in October. Blinken reinforced that message with a visit Sunday to a warehouse containing boxes of canned food destined for Gaza. Desperately needed supplies are arriving in the Palestinian enclave by trucks in a relief effort organized by the United Nations World Food Programme.
Sheri Ritsema-Anderson, the UN resident coordinator in Jordan, told reporters that in her 15 years working in the Middle East, she had never seen a humanitarian situation as dire as that in Gaza, describing it as an “epic catastrophe.” . Some 220 trucks with various types of aid and fuel now arrive in Gaza daily, but that is only a fraction of the amount needed, she said.
As the conflict reached its three-month mark, the United Nations emergency relief coordinator called for peace.
“We continue to demand an immediate end to the war,” said UN official Martin Griffiths, “not only for the people of Gaza and their threatened neighbors, but for generations to come who will never forget these 90 days of hell.” and attacks on the most basic precepts of humanity.”
In the three months since the “horrible attacks of October 7,” he said, “Gaza has become a place of death and despair.”
Over the weekend, the Israeli military gave the public a detailed presentation of the gains it had made against Hamas, but warned against unrealistic expectations. The army’s top spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said he was still determined to dismantle Hamas’ capabilities both above ground and underground, where the militants have an extensive network of tunnels. But achieving that goal, he warned, “will take time” and predicted that fighting would continue throughout 2024.
Admiral Hagari, in a presentation broadcast on Israeli television and the Internet on Saturday night, said the army had “completed the dismantling of the Hamas military framework” in the northern part of Gaza, where Israel began its ground invasion in late October.
But even with their command structure destroyed, Hamas fighters are still involved in skirmishes with Israeli fighters, Israelis say.
“While Hamas’s ability to function in the north has taken a serious hit, it still has infrastructure above and below ground, so it remains a combat zone,” said Gabi Siboni, colonel of the military reserves. and member of the conservative party. Inclined by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.
Hamas, Colonel Siboni said, is “a difficult and determined enemy.”
“It will take time to completely dismantle it,” he said, adding that fighting in the south is even more complicated due to the density of the civilian population there. Around a million Gaza residents moved south after the Israeli army ordered them to leave the north.
Nachman Shai, a former Israeli government minister who was once the top military spokesman, said Admiral Hagari’s presentation seemed intended in part to shore up Israeli morale. “This is a very long war in Israeli terms,” Shai said. He added that the presentation “was a way to encourage people. Saying we are reaching our goals but it will take time, so bear with us.”
In the presentation, Admiral Hagari said that in the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza, Hamas had maintained two military brigades with 12 battalions, totaling some 14,000 fighters. Israel found eight kilometers of tunnels in that area alone, he said. Hamas fighters there “now operate without a framework and without commanders” and are still capable of launching sporadic rockets toward Israel, he said.
The army announced in recent days that it would begin withdrawing several thousand troops from the Gaza Strip, at least temporarily. But it is still unclear what the next phase will look like.
Amos Yadlin, former head of military intelligence and founder of MIND Israel, a research organization specializing in national security, laid out several possible scenarios in an article published Sunday on N12, a prominent Israeli news site.
One option for Israel, he wrote, would be to hold onto northern Gaza to prevent Hamas from reestablishing itself there and use it as a bargaining chip for the return of hostages, while forcing the remaining fighters out of the tunnels. there. Another possibility, she said, would involve allowing the gradual return of residents to the north, with the aim of establishing stability there and trying to make it a model for the eventual reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, even as fighting continues in the south.
On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike in the south killed two journalists, including Hamza al-Dahdouh, son of Wael al-Dahdouh, a well-known Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera TV, who has dedicated his career to covering Gaza. Wael al-Dahdouh had already lost his wife, another son, a daughter and a young grandson in an Israeli airstrike in October.
The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, reported that an Israeli drone strike hit the car carrying Hamza al-Dahdouh, west of the southern city of Khan Younis. The other murdered journalist was Mustafa Thuraya.
“I wish that the blood of my son Hamza is the last of the journalists and the last of the people here in Gaza, and that this massacre ends,” Wael al-Dahdouh told Al Jazeera on Sunday.
As of Saturday, at least 70 Palestinian journalists and media workers had been murdered in Gaza, some while covering the conflict, others when they were at home or sheltered with their families, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, Eduardo Wong from Amman, Jordan and Doha, Qatar, and Thomas Fuller Of California. Vivian Yee and Andrés R. Martínez contributed reports.
