CAIRO: Israeli forces battled Hamas fighters in the narrow alleyways of Jabalia in northern Gaza on Friday in some of the fiercest engagements since they returned to the area a week ago, while in the south fighters attacked tanks massing around Rafah.
Residents said Israeli armour had thrust as far as the market at the heart of Jabalia, the largest of Gaza's eight historic refugee camps, and that bulldozers were demolishing homes and shops in the path of the advance.
As fighting raged in the north and south of the territory, the US military said trucks carrying humanitarian assistance had started moving ashore from a temporary pier in Gaza on Friday.
"Israel's focus is Jabalia now, tanks and planes are wiping out residential districts and markets, shops, restaurants, everything. It is all happening before the one-eyed world," said Ayman Rajab, a resident of western Jabalia.
"Shame on the world. Meanwhile, the Americans are going to get us some food," Rajab, a father-of-four, told Reuters via a chat app. "We want no food, we want this war to end and then we can manage our lives on our own."
Israel had said its forces had cleared Jabalia months earlier in the Gaza war, triggered by the deadly Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, but said last week it was returning to prevent the group re-establishing itself there. The fighting has coincided with the assault on Rafah at the southern edge of the strip, sending hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from both ends of the territory at once.
At the World Court in The Hague, Israel asked judges to throw out a demand from South Africa for an emergency order to halt the assault on Rafah and withdraw Israeli troops from all of Gaza.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement its troops had killed more than 60 fighters in recent days and located a weapons warehouse close to a shelter complex in what it described as a "divisional-level offensive" in Jabalia.
A divisional operation would typically involve multiple brigades of thousands of troops each, making it one of the biggest of the war.
Despite seven months of near-continuous fighting, armed wings of Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad have been able to fight up and down the Gaza Strip, using heavily fortified tunnels to stage attacks, highlighting the difficulty of achieving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's stated aim of eradicating the group.
At least 35,303 Palestinians have now been killed in the war, according to figures from the enclave's health ministry, while aid agencies have warned repeatedly of widespread hunger and the threat of disease.
Doctors complain they have to perform surgery, including amputations, with no anaesthetics or painkillers as the medical system in the territory has virtually collapsed.
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