Netanyahu orders Israeli army to prepare to evacuate Rafah civilians

Move comes despite US warnings that it will not support a ground invasion of last relatively safe city in Gaza

Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s army to prepare to evacuate civilians from Rafah on Friday ahead of a “massive operation”.
The move comes despite US warnings that it would not support a ground invasion of the last relatively safe city in Gaza.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said the military had been asked to draft a “combined plan” to move civilians out of the southern border city, now home to 1.3 million people, in order to destroy what is thought to be the final bolthole for Hamas.
“It is impossible to achieve the war objective of dismantling Hamas while letting four Hamas battalions be in Rafah,” said Mr Netanyahu. “On the other hand, it is clear that a massive operation in Rafah requires an evacuation of the civilian population from the combat area.”
Four months into Israel’s war against Hamas, much of Gaza has been obliterated by bombings and ground operations, including mass demolitions along the border with Israel.
More than a half of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.2 million has fled the fighting and destruction and is now crammed into a small corner of the south-east of the territory, where conditions are dire.
Mr Netanyahu’s statement comes despite the clearest criticism yet from Washington, Israel’s key ally, that such a move would not be acceptable.
“I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, has been over the top,” Joe Biden, the US president, said on Thursday. “There are a lot of innocent people who are starving… in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.”
A State Department spokesman added that an Israeli ground operation in Rafah was “not something we’d support” and that without proper planning it would be “a disaster”.
Aid agencies including the United Nations have also warned Israel against expanding operations to Rafah, currently the only area in Gaza where the most basic services are available to Palestinians.
“We need Gaza’s last remaining hospitals, shelters, markets and water systems to stay functional,” said Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF, the UN children’s agency. “Without them, hunger and disease will skyrocket, taking more child lives.”
The Israeli Defense Forces previously insisted that gaining control of Gaza City in the north and later Khan Younis in the south was crucial to dismantling Hamas as an organised force.
The military establishment, however, now believes that Hamas leadership is hiding in tunnels underneath Rafah and that Israel cannot overpower the terrorist group unless it engages with its remaining forces in the south.
The IDF previously gave Gazans short notice evacuation orders, but they were next to impossible to follow amid carpet-bombings across the enclave.
Mr Netanyahu’s statement, however, may indicate that the Israeli authorities could be willing to provide for a genuine evacuation this time. It was not immediately clear where Palestinians could be evacuated to from the south as the rest of the Gaza Strip lies in ruins, with the most basic infrastructure collapsed.
Witnesses reported new strikes on Rafah overnight after the Israeli military intensified air raids. The Palestinian Red Crescent said three children were killed in one strike.
“We heard the sound of a huge explosion next to our house… we found two children martyred in the street,” said Jaber al-Bardini, 60. “There is no safe place in Rafah. If they storm Rafah we will die in our homes. We have no choice. We don’t want to go anywhere else.”
Separately, Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, said on Friday that he held talks with his Israeli counterpart about “post-conflict planning for Gaza”, a subject Mr Netanyahu has refused to discuss and has strongly dissuaded the members of his cabinet from doing so.
Israel’s war against Hamas, launched in October in retaliation to the massacre of 1,200 people by Hamas in southern Israel, has already killed over 28,000 people, according to officials in Gaza.
Egypt also appeared to be preparing for heightened fighting on its border. Cairo has sent about 40 tanks and armoured personnel carriers to north-eastern Sinai within the past two weeks as part of a series of measures to bolster security on its border with Gaza, two Egyptian security sources said.