Battles rage across Gaza as Israel indicates it’s willing to fight for months or more to beat Hamas
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Battles raged across Gaza on Sunday as Israel indicated it was prepared to fight for months or longer to defeat the territory’s Hamas rulers, and a key mediator said willingness to discuss a cease-fire was fading.
Israel faces international outrage after its military offensive, with diplomatic support and arms from close ally the United States, has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians.
About 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced within the besieged territory, where U.N. agencies say there is no safe place to flee.
The United States has lent vital support in recent days by vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution to end the fighting and pushing through an emergency sale of over $100 million worth of tank ammunition to Israel.
Russia backed the resolution. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and expressed dissatisfaction with “anti-Israel positions” taken by Moscow’s envoys at the U.N. and elsewhere, an Israeli statement said.
Netanyahu told Putin that any country assaulted the way Israel was “would have reacted with no less force than Israel is using,” the statement added.
The U.N. General Assembly scheduled an emergency meeting Tuesday to vote on a draft resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., told The Associated Press that it’s similar to the Security Council resolution the U.S. vetoed Friday.
There are no vetoes in the General Assembly but unlike the Security Council its resolutions are not legally binding. They are important nonetheless as a barometer of global opinion.
Israel’s air and ground war has killed thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and other militants killed 1,200 people and captured around 240. Over 100 of them were released during a weeklong cease-fire last month.
With very little aid allowed in, Palestinians face severe shortages of food, water and other basic goods. Some observers openly worry that Palestinians will be forced out of Gaza altogether.
“Expect public order to completely break down soon, and an even worse situation could unfold including epidemic diseases and increased pressure for mass displacement into Egypt,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a forum in Qatar, a key intermediary.
Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, called allegations of mass displacement from Gaza “outrageous and false.”
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, told the forum that mediation efforts seeking to stop the war and have all hostages released will continue, but “unfortunately, we are not seeing the same willingness that we had seen in the weeks before.”
Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, told Israel’s Channel 12 TV that the U.S. has set no deadline for Israel to achieve its goals. “The evaluation that this can’t be measured in weeks is correct, and I’m not sure it can be measured in months,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN that as far as the duration and the conduct of the fighting, “these are decisions for Israel to make.”
