Israel has extended the deadline for Palestinians to evacuate Gaza until four this afternoon. After the insistent calls from the UN, the European Union and the US president himself, Joe Biden, to avoid a “humanitarian catastrophe” due to the short time offered in the first ultimatum, the Tel Aviv authorities have slightly relaxed their position and advised the population of the north of the Strip to move to the south between 10:00 and 16:00 (between 9:00 and 15:00, time in Spain), a window in which they assure that there will be no bombings on Gaza.
“If you care about yourself and your loved ones, go south as instructed,” the military says in a statement setting out evacuation corridors. The Defense Forces tell the Palestinians that, while they are at the risk of bombs, “rest assured that Hamas leaders have taken care of themselves and are protecting themselves from attacks in the region.”
Until last night, some 400,000 people, of the million or so that occupy this area of the Strip, had left their homes in difficult conditions of flight, carrying their supplies or leaving them at home while they dodged the bombings of Israeli aircraft in hundreds of points along along the Strip. Israel has informed the UN that this entire population must relocate to the south, the only safe place that the ground invasion will not reach.
The Netanyahu Government’s new ultimatum somehow implies the immediacy of this large-scale operation. The Israeli troops could enter Gaza this evening or still maintain their plan of “lolized raids”, such as those carried out on Friday night and which, it seems, have allowed them to recover the bodies of several hostages. . However, the first scenario is the most consistent, since in recent hours the actions of the assault groups have been aimed at eliminating Hamas missile batteries to presumably clear the ground for the infantry and armor.
In one of them the head of the Hamas air forces was killed this morning. Abu Murad, killed in a night attack on a terrorist group headquarters in Gaza. The leader was one of the men most wanted by the army since he was among the main architects of the offensive carried out by the Islamist militia against Israel last Saturday. Abu Murad “had an important role in directing the terrorists during the massacre,” a military statement specified this morning, according to which the leader planned the entry of hundreds of heavily armed militiamen by paraglider into Israeli territory.
The Defense Forces have reported that in the “generalized” assaults last night, dozens of enclaves used by Hamas commandos have been destroyed and the infiltration of “two terrorists” through the fence has been prevented. Both were located by Israeli soldiers as soon as they crossed the Gaza fence and were killed after a projectile was fired from a tank.
Tel Aviv has specified that among the guerrilla positions attacked are several bases from which the massacres a week ago in several kibbutzim and a music festival on the Israeli side were planned. Since then, 1,500 Hamas members have been killed and several hundred are believed to have been taken prisoner.
Last morning was full of events. The selective assaults in Gaza have made it possible to recover the bodies of several hostages, as well as personal belongings of other kidnapped people who, it is assumed, have been transferred to other refuges of the terrorist group. The army has not yet confirmed how many bodies have been rescued or the number of captives who remain alive.
The only information that has been leaked in this regard indicates that the military, supported by armored vehicles and tanks, searched an area of the Strip where it is assumed that many of the 150 or 200 hostages taken by the Hamas militias had been taken. It is unknown, at the moment, if the bodies recovered belong to missing persons who were executed by terrorists or died in the bombings this week.
The soldiers have also returned from Gaza with abundant documentation found in the assaulted bases or among the belongings of the killed militiamen. According to ‘The Times of Israel’, these papers include attack schedules, assault plans and intelligence information regarding the number of inhabitants in an Israeli village. The public broadcaster Kan also reported on Friday night the discovery of a statement from the Hamas leadership calling for the invasion of Kibbutz Alumim and the murder of as many civilians as possible, as they did in other towns. The material found in the hands of the terrorists also mentions an elementary school and a youth center as targets in which to “kill as many people as possible,” according to “top secret” documents released by NBC, and an order to kidnap as many as possible. of inhabitants of another kibbutz very close to the border in order to transfer them to Gaza. Most reports ask terrorist cells, after indiscriminately killing or capturing civilians, to make every effort to combat Israeli troops and hold out until receiving further instructions.
The first review of these documents seems to surprise the Israeli Intelligence services due to the level of specificity of the attack plans, which included a series of massacres in the communities of Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz and Alumim, notes the Tel Aviv newspaper. In many of these plans there is very specific data about the profile of the population, the objectives that Hamas pursues in each population, and the insistence on focusing violence on women and children.
Hamas’s political office has assured from its headquarters in Doha that it was unaware of the armed wing’s attack plans. “All Hamas leaders who are not military received the news early Saturday morning,” said spokesman Moussa Abu Marzouk in an interview with The New Yorker. The leader establishes a clear separation between the military wing, which “plans and executes” the offensives, and the bureau where he is a member, which establishes “political proposals.” Despite the abundance of videos recorded by witnesses and by the militants themselves, Abu Marzouk does not believe that Hamas has participated in massacres of civilians, which he attributes to other terrorist groups of which he does not name, but assumes the existence of hostages. Abu Marzouk warns, however, that the threat to kill the captives made by the militiamen is “a mistake; “We cannot execute the hostages.”
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