Israel bombards central Gaza as offensive expands

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces bombarded central Gaza on Tuesday and issued orders telling residents to evacuate, signs that the military plans to expand its ground offensive into another part of the territory.

The U.S. said Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, was meeting Tuesday with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the fight “isn’t close to finished.” Israeli forces have been engaged in heavy urban fighting in northern Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis.

Israel’s military says the war will last for “many months” as it vows to crush the ruling Hamas terrorist group after its Oct. 7 attack that killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 others hostage. Israel aims to free the more than 100 hostages who remain in captivity.

The Israeli military announced the deaths of two more soldiers, bringing the total killed since the ground offensive began to 161.

“We say to the Hamas terrorists: We see you and we will get to you,” Netanyahu said.

Israel said it would no longer grant automatic visas to U.N. employees and accused the world body of being “complicit partners” in Hamas’ tactics.

Government spokesman Eylon Levy said Israel would consider visa requests case by case.

More than 20,900 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, whose count doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza, citing terrorists’ use of crowded residential areas and tunnels. Israel also says it has killed thousands of terrorists.

The Israeli military ordered residents to evacuate a belt of territory the width of central Gaza, urging them to move to nearby Deir al-Balah. The military later said it was operating in Bureij and said that it had located a Hamas training camp.

A telecom outage announced by Gaza’s main provider, Paltel, follows similar outages through much of the war. NetBlocks, a group that tracks internet outages, confirmed that network connectivity in Gaza was disrupted again and “likely to leave most residents offline.”

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said several countries had sent proposals to resolve the conflict following news of an Egyptian proposal that would include a transitional Palestinian government in Gaza and the West Bank.

He said Hamas “has been open to all initiatives that achieve a full cease-fire.”

Regional spillover

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel faces a “multi-arena war” from seven different fronts — Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. “We have responded and acted already on six of these,” he told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Throughout the war, Iranian-backed militia groups around the region have stepped up attacks in support of Hamas terrorists.

Iran has vowed to destroy Israel.

Iranian-backed militias in Iraq carried out a drone strike on a U.S. base in Irbil in northern Iraq on Monday, wounding three American service members, one critically, according to U.S. officials. In response, U.S. warplanes before dawn hit three locations in Iraq connected to a main militia, Kataib Hezbollah.

An Israeli strike on Monday hit a neighborhood of the Syrian capital, Damascus, killing Gen. Seyed Razi Mousavi, an adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Israel’s military did not comment.

Almost daily, Hezbollah and Israel exchange missiles, airstrikes and shelling across the Israeli-Lebanese border.

On Tuesday, Israel’s military said Hezbollah struck a Greek Orthodox church in northern Israel with a missile, wounding two Israeli Christians, and fired again on arriving soldiers, wounding nine.

“Hezbollah is risking the stability of the region for the sake of Hamas,” said Israel’s military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

In the Red Sea, attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against commercial ships have disrupted trade and prompted a U.S.-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping routes.

Expanding Gaza offensive

In the north, troops are focusing on the Gaza City neighborhood of Daraj Tufah, believed to be one of Hamas’ last strongholds in the area, according to reports from Israeli military correspondents, who receive briefings from army commanders.

The reports also said the army aims to destroy an estimated 70 percent of Hamas infrastructure.

Deir al-Balah and Rafah, in the south on the Egyptian border, have been overwhelmed with displaced people, even as Israel bombards them.

U.N. officials say a quarter of Gaza’s population is starving. Last week, the U.N. Security Council called for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to Gaza, but there has been little sign of change.

A strike Tuesday hit a home in Mawasi, a rural area in the province of Khan Younis that Israel declared a safe zone.

In response, Israel’s military said that it wouldn’t refrain from operating in safe zones, “if it identifies terrorist organization activity threatening the security of Israel.”

Wafaa Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, and Samy Magdy from Cairo. Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, contributed to this report.