Israeli soldiers next to military vehicles near the Israel-Gaza border, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in southern Israel. (Photo: Reuters)
Israeli tanks and warplanes bombarded areas of Rafah on Thursday, Palestinian residents said, after US President Joe Biden vowed to withhold weapons from Israel if its forces launch a major invasion of the southern Gaza city.
As ceasefire talks continued in Cairo, Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said their fighters fired anti-tank rockets and mortars at Israeli tanks massed on the eastern outskirts of the city.
Residents and medics in Rafah, the biggest urban area in Gaza not yet overrun by Israeli ground forces, said an Israeli attack by a mosque killed at least three people and wounded others in the eastern Brazil neighbourhood.
Video footage from the scene showed the minaret lying in the rubble, two bodies wrapped in blankets and a wounded man being carried away.
On the city’s eastern edge, residents said a helicopter opened fire, while drones hovered above houses in several areas, some close to rooftops.
Israel says Hamas militants are hiding in Rafah, where the population has been swelled by hundreds of thousands of Gazans seeking refuge from bombardments elsewhere in the coastal enclave, and it needs to eliminate them for its own security.
Ceasefire talks in Egypt’s capital made some headway but no deal was reached, according to two Egyptian security sources.
“Over the past few hours, we’ve been adjusting and adding and deleting points based on consultations with both sides,” one of the sources said.
The Hamas delegation left for Doha for consultations, blaming Israel for the lack of agreement so far.
Biden, who says Israel has not produced a convincing plan to safeguard civilians in Rafah, issued his starkest warning yet against a full ground invasion. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah, … I’m not supplying the weapons,”Biden told CNN in an interview on Wednesday.
He said said he would halt additional shipments of offensive weapons to Israel if the country launched a ground invasion of Rafah, decrying the potential loss of civilian life as “just wrong.”
Israeli tanks seized the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, cutting off a vital aid route and forcing 80,000 people to flee the city this week, according to the United Nations. “The toll on these families is unbearable. Nowhere is safe,” the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said in a post on X.
An Israeli military statement on Gaza operations on Thursday morning did not refer to Rafah.
The United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, and it accelerated deliveries after the Hamas attacks on October 7 that triggered Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Biden acknowledged that U.S. bombs have killed Palestinian civilians in the seven-month-old offensive.
US officials have said Washington paused delivery of a shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs to Israel because of the risk to civilians in Gaza.
Houthis to target any goods-related ship to Israel
The leader of Yemen’s Houthis, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, said on Thursday the group would target ships of any company related to supplying or transporting goods to Israel regardless of their destination. He said this was a fourth stage of escalation in retaliation to “the Israeli aggression on Rafah” in the southern Gaza Strip. “From now on, we are also thinking about the fifth stage and the sixth stage, and we have very important, sensitive and influential choices on the enemies,” he added.
Months of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have disrupted global shipping, forcing firms to re-route to longer and more expensive journeys around southern Africa, and stoked fears that the Israel-Hamas war could spread to destabilise the wider West Asia.
The United States and Britain have carried out strikes against Houthi targets in response to the attacks on shipping.
First Published: May 10 2024 | 1:11 AM IST
