As Israel continued its assault on Gaza, its forces fought violent battles on Monday in three areas of the Strip, the place Israeli officers imagine Hamas activists nonetheless have strongholds.
Khan Younes
Khan Yunis is the biggest metropolis within the southern Gaza Strip. The Strip’s inhabitants, which was about 200,000 individuals earlier than the battle, swelled within the first month of the battle, after Israel ordered civilians to depart the northern a part of the Strip earlier than its floor invasion. Many Hamas fighters are additionally believed to have moved south, and Khan Yunis – its residential buildings, hospitals and shelters crowded with civilians – didn’t escape the early combating. Israel repeatedly focused the town with air strikes.
The Israeli military now describes Khan Yunis because the “navy capital of Hamas” and, in current weeks, has instructed civilians there to flee in direction of the border as its forces advance south. Town is the house of Yahya Sinwar, the chief of Hamas in Gaza. “Our forces are surrounding Sinwar’s dwelling,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned in a video posted final week on social media. He can escape, but it surely’s solely a matter of time till we get to him.
Jabalia
Jabalia started as a refugee camp a long time in the past and has change into a densely populated neighborhood of residential compounds in northern Gaza, inhabited by about 100,000 individuals. Lots of them are Palestinians and their descendants who fled or had been expelled from their houses in the course of the battle sparked by the creation of Israel in 1948.
Jabalia has lengthy been thought-about a Hamas stronghold. It additionally has a well-known place in Palestinian historical past: it’s the place the place the primary intifada towards Israel, identified in Arabic because the Intifada, started on December 9, 1987.
Within the a long time since, it has been the scene of combating in virtually each bout of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and has been subjected to repeated air strikes because the begin of the present battle on October 7.
On October 31, Israel used at the least two 2,000-pound bombs throughout an airstrike in Jabalia, in keeping with consultants and a New York Occasions evaluation of satellite tv for pc photographs, pictures and movies. Hospital officers mentioned that dozens of civilians had been killed and tons of injured within the raid. Israel mentioned it was concentrating on a Hamas chief and fighter, in addition to a community of underground tunnels utilized by Hamas to cover weapons and fighters.
Shujaiya
One other neighborhood in northern Gaza, Shujaiya, can be a densely populated space that has been hit by comparable Israeli air strikes because the battle started.
Israel has lengthy mentioned the neighborhood is used as a base for Hamas, and was the scene of a bloody Israeli assault in a earlier battle in Gaza in 2014. Preventing in July of that 12 months led to what was one of many bloodiest days for the Strip. The Palestinians and the Israeli military in that battle. A minimum of 60 Palestinians and 13 Israeli troopers and officers had been killed in Shujaiya in an assault that the then UN Secretary-Normal, Ban Ki-moon, described as an “atrocity.”