War in the Middle East
Nighttime ground fighting and communications failure in the Gaza Strip
Smoke from explosions caused by Israeli shelling in the northern Gaza Strip rises into the night sky
© Abed Khaled / DPA
A few hours after the announcement of the expansion of ground operations in Gaza, fighting broke out between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters. Because mobile communications and the internet are interrupted, Gaza is now completely cut off from the outside world – to the great concern of aid organizations.
The Gaza Strip was rocked by fighting on Saturday morning following Israel’s announcement that it would expand its ground operations overnight. “Our troops are operating inside the Gaza Strip, just as they did yesterday,” Israeli military spokesman Nir Dinar told AFP on Friday evening. The radical Islamic Palestinian organization Hamas, for its part, reported “violent clashes.” Meanwhile, human rights organizations warned that atrocities could go undetected given the communications blackout in the Gaza Strip.
Ground forces are “expanding their ground operations tonight,” Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari announced on Friday evening. The Israeli army had already carried out ground operations with tanks in the densely populated Palestinian area on the previous two nights. Both times it was a “targeted attack,” the armed forces said. The announced large-scale Israeli ground offensive in However, the Gaza Strip had so far failed to appear.
On Friday evening, the north of the Gaza Strip was heavily shelled by the Israeli army, as live footage from the AFP news agency showed.
The Essedin al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, reported fighting against Israeli soldiers in two areas on Friday. There is an Israeli ground attack in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip and in eastern Bureij in the center and there are “violent clashes,” it said.
The brigade had previously declared on the online service Telegram that it had fired “missile salvos” into Israeli territory following the Israeli air strikes on Friday evening. According to Israeli media reports, rockets were fired towards Tel Aviv, the center of the country and the north of the occupied West Bank.
The Hamas leadership said Israel cut off communications and most of the internet in the Gaza Strip on Friday. The Hamas government’s media office accused Israel of using this move “to carry out massacres with bloody retaliatory strikes from the air, on land and at sea.”
Meanwhile, international organizations expressed concern about the communications blackout in the Gaza Strip. The current outage of the mobile network and the Internet poses the risk “that mass atrocities will be covered up and human rights violations will go unpunished,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Friday. The residents are “almost completely cut off from the outside world.”
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Several international organizations announced on Friday that they would no longer have contact with their employees in the Gaza Strip, including Amnesty International. The communications blackout means “it will be even more difficult to obtain important information and evidence on human rights violations and war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip,” the organization said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said on online service The outage also affected the emergency number 101 and hindered the care of injured people.
The Israeli army, meanwhile, accused Hamas of using hospitals in the Gaza Strip as strategic centers for its attacks against Israel. The militant Palestinian organization uses the hospitals “as command centers and hiding places” with access to its underground tunnel system, said military spokesman Hagari. In addition, Hamas uses the fuel stored in these civilian facilities for its attacks.
A large-scale Israeli ground offensive in the Gaza Strip has been expected since Hamas’ major attack began on October 7th. According to Israeli information, around 1,400 people were killed and 229 people were kidnapped as hostages in the Hamas attack on Israel. In response, Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip and launched massive airstrikes.
According to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, more than 7,300 people have now been killed. This information cannot be independently verified.