Israel maintains offensive on Gaza despite calls for ceasefire

Israel maintained its offensive on Gaza on Thursday in spite of growing international calls for a ceasefire, and Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant told visiting US national security adviser Jake Sullivan that destroying Hamas will take time.

“It will require a period of time – it will last more than several months, but we will win and we will destroy them,” he said of the militant group that governs the Gaza Strip.

Israel pounded the length of the coastal enclave on Thursday, killing families in their homes even as Mr Sullivan pressed the US ally to encourage its ally to guard better against civilian casualties.

The more than two-month-old war is now raging across the entire Palestinian enclave, causing a humanitarian catastrophe, with little end in sight.

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Mr Sullivan’s visit was the first in a series by senior US officials planned for the next few days, with Washington also pressing Israel for a date to end the fighting and for clarification on how it sees Gaza the day after the war.

The Israeli Defense Forces said more than 70 suspected gunmen were arrested in the area of a hospital in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip. Footage released by the army showed several of the detainees exiting the building shirtless and placing weapons on the ground.

Israeli troops had surrounded the facility and threatened to “take measures according to international law” if the alleged militants didn’t surrender.

Gaza is again suffering a communications blackout after the heavy fighting caused internet and phone networks to crash. Mobile phone and internet services have gone down several times since war broke out, sometimes due to infrastructure being destroyed and sometimes to lack of fuel.

Residents of Gaza report that the IDF has distributed flyers offering the equivalent of €360,000 to those who provide information about the whereabouts of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, warned on Thursday that Rafah, on the border with Egypt, does not have the infrastructure to host the more than one million people who have fled there to avoid the fighting from other parts of Gaza

He said the city had quadrupled in population and there were tens of thousands of people living outside Unrwa shelters “in the open, in the cold, in the mud, and under the rain”.

[ How the loss of entire families is ravaging the social fabric of Gaza ]

[ Gaza’s humanitarian crisis compounded by heavy rain and floods ]

Nearly 1.9 million people – more than 85 per cent of Gaza’s population – have been displaced since Israel started its attacks on October 7th, when Hamas-led gunmen staged a surprise attack on Israel. Some 1,200 people were killed, according to Israel, most of them civilians, and 240 kidnapped .

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 18,600 Palestinians have been killed in the war, and more than 50,000 wounded.

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, on Thursday accused the International Committee of the Red Cross of failing in its mission by not securing access to the remaining 135 hostages in Gaza. ICRC president Mirjana Spoljaric Egger told Mr Cohen she could not force Hamas to agree to humanitarian visits.

Palestinian sources report that three residents were killed during an Israeli military incursion on Wednesday night in the militant stronghold of Jenin – the third consecutive day that the IDF has entered the northern West Bank city.

The Israeli army has removed a number of soldiers from operational duty after they used the loudspeaker of a Jenin mosque to sing a song marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which ended on Thursday.

Iran’s defence minister Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani warned on Thursday that a proposed US-backed multinational task force to protect shipping in the Red Sea would face what he termed “extraordinary problems”.

“Nobody can make a move in a region where we have predominance,” he said.

The international flotilla was put together after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen attacked a number of Israeli-owned vessels and ships heading towards Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat since the start of the Gaza war. - Additional reporting Reuters