Frantic U.S. and international efforts to prevent a full-scale Israeli assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah appeared to be making little headway as Israel Defense Forces continued advancing and thousands more Palestinian civilians attempted to flee the besieged city.
Sunday brought fresh signs the fighting may be spreading beyond Rafah, despite intense U.S.-backed regional efforts to forge at least a temporary cease-fire and pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrain his forces.
The Biden administration has been warning of a humanitarian disaster if Israel moved on Rafah, where the last full Hamas fighting units are holed up in a city of more than 2 million.
Israel continues to urge Gaza residents to leave the city for a protected sanctuary along the enclave’s southern coast, even as Israeli tank shells reportedly were landing near the city.
A defiant Mr. Netanyahu has insisted the offensive will continue until Hamas, which launched the Oct. 7 terror assault that killed 1,200 and took hundreds of Israeli and foreign hostages, is destroyed as a fighting force.
The failure to forge a cease-fire has strained U.S.-Israeli relations: President Biden on Friday confirmed he is blocking all new offensive weapons to Israel, saying there was evidence the Israeli campaign to avenge Oct. 7 has violated international law regarding the treatment of civilians in wartime.
Israel rejects those claims, but Palestinian health officials — citing records that could not be independently confirmed — said Sunday the total number of Palestinian deaths in the seven-month war now tops 35,000, with another 78,755 injured, with civilians making up the vast bulk of casualties.
The United Nations’ top human rights official said Sunday that Israeli orders for an evacuation of Palestinian civilians trapped in Rafah are impractical and unlikely to avoid “further atrocity crimes.”
“These exhausted, famished people, many of whom have been displaced many times already, have no good options,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, said in a statement.
“I can see no way that the latest evacuation orders, much less a full assault, in an area with an extremely dense presence of civilians, can be reconciled with the binding requirements of international humanitarian law and with the two sets of binding provisional measures ordered by the international court of justice,” Mr. Turk added.
Israel has now evacuated the eastern third of Rafah, said IDF Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, and U.N. officials say some 300,000 Rafah residents have managed to flee the city since fighting began.
But even as Israeli forces massed near Rafah, there were reports that the Israel Defense Forces were in renewed battles with Hamas in other parts of the Gaza Strip, areas supposedly cleared in the early days of the fighting.
Palestinians reported heavy Israeli bombardment overnight in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp and other areas in the northern Gaza Strip, the Associated Press reported Sunday. Other northern Gaza targets were hit as well, as Hamas said it had fired back at Israeli positions.
“We identified in the past weeks attempts by Hamas to rehabilitate its military capabilities in Jabaliya,” Adm. Hagari told reporters. “We are operating there to eliminate those attempts,”
He said that IDF forces were also operating in Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, two towns near Gaza‘s northern border with Israel that were heavily bombed in the opening days of the war.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.