The Israeli army says it wants to expand its ground operations in the Gaza Strip at night. The military has already increased its attacks. The internet no longer works in Gaza.
Israel’s army has announced that it will expand its ground operations in the Gaza Strip against the militant Islamist Hamas during the night. Military spokesman Daniel Hagari announced this in the evening on the X platform, formerly Twitter. In the past few hours, the military has increased its attacks in the Gaza Strip. He further explained that underground targets and terrorist infrastructure were increasingly being attacked.
As live footage from the AFP news agency shows, the north of the Gaza Strip was heavily shelled by the Israeli army in the evening. The attacks began around 7 p.m. local time and are continuing. The Israeli army had already announced that morning that it had attacked more than 250 targets in the Gaza Strip within 24 hours.
It is unclear whether the latest announcement marks the start of the Israeli military’s widely anticipated ground offensive. The Israeli military had previously carried out isolated, time-limited advances on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are standing at the border ready to move into the Gaza Strip.
No internet in the Gaza Strip
According to the Palestinian telecommunications company Paltel, all communications and internet services in the Gaza Strip are currently down. The heavy bombing by the Israeli army is to blame.
The organization Netblocks, which is known for monitoring Internet blocks, also confirmed on X that Internet connections in the Gaza Strip had collapsed. This has a major impact on Paltel. The company is the last major operator still offering services in the coastal area.
Aid organizations expressed concern about the consequences of the outage. The Palestinian Red Crescent wrote on X that they had lost contact with all operations centers and teams in the Gaza Strip. The rescuers were concerned about whether the emergency services were currently able to continue providing emergency medical services. The emergency call center was also affected by the outage.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) also expressed concern. “Without access to information in a communications blackout, people do not know where to seek safety,” the ICRC said.
Hamas reports its own attacks
The Hamas leadership said Israel had cut off communications and most of the internet throughout the Gaza Strip. The terrorist militia’s media office accused Israel of using this step “to carry out massacres with bloody retaliatory strikes from the air, on land and at sea.” The Israeli attacks were “the most violent since the beginning of the war” on October 7th.
The Essedin al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, said on Telegram that it had fired “barrels of rockets” into Israeli territory following the Israeli airstrikes. According to Israeli media reports, rockets were fired towards Tel Aviv, the center of the country and the north of the occupied West Bank.
Since the major attack by the militant Islamist Hamas that began on October 7th, a large-scale Israeli ground offensive in the Gaza Strip has been expected. According to Israeli sources, around 1,400 people were killed and 229 people were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip in the Hamas attack on Israel. In response, Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip and launched massive airstrikes on suspected Hamas targets. Thousands of people have been killed and humanitarian aid for people in the densely populated Gaza Strip is on the verge of collapse.