DEIR AL-BALAH: Israel said Friday that the military was rounding up Palestinian men in northern Gaza for interrogation, searching for Hamas militants, while desperate Palestinians in the south crowded into an ever-shrinking area, and the UN warned that its aid operation is "in tatters."
The detentions pointed to Israeli efforts to secure the military's hold on northern Gaza as the war entered its third month. Furious urban fighting has continued in the north, underscoring Hamas' heavy resistance, and tens of thousands of residents are believed to remain in the area six weeks after troops and tanks rolled in.
The first images of mass detentions emerged Thursday from the northern town of Beit Lahiya, showing dozens of men kneeling or sitting in the streets, stripped down to their underwear, their hands bound behind their backs and some with their heads bowed. UN monitors said Israeli troops reportedly detained men and boys from the age of 15 in a school-turned-shelter.
Israel has vowed to crush the military capabilities of Hamas, which rules Gaza, and remove it from power following the group's Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war.
Israel's air and ground campaign initially focused on the northern half of Gaza, leading hundreds of thousands of residents to flee south. A week ago, Israel expanded its ground assault into central and south Gaza, where nearly the territory's entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians are crowded, many of them cut off from humanitarian supplies.
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In central Gaza, Israeli planes on Friday dropped leaflets on the refugee camps of Nuseirat and Maghazi with a message for Hamas officials.
"To Hamas leaders: A life for a life, an eye for an eye and whoever started is to blame. If you punish, then punish with the like of that wherewith you were afflicted," the leaflet read, cobbling together verses from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, that are similar to a warning in the Old Testament.
The leaflet left out the rest of the Quranic verse, which says it is better to patiently endure afflictions without retaliating at all.
Hours later, a strike shattered a residential building in Nuseirat camp, killing at least 21 people, according to officials at the nearby hospital. Following the blast, residents were seen digging beneath the rubble, looking for survivors and belongings that could be unearthed.
Hundreds rounded up
Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, said Friday that those detained in northern Gaza were "military-aged men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago."
Authorities were questioning the detainees to determine whether they were members of the militant group, Levy said, indicating there would be more such sweeps going forward as troops move from north to south.
The London-based news outlet Al-Araby al-Jadeed, or The New Arab, said one of the men seen in the photos of the detainees is its Gaza correspondent Diaa al-Kahlout, and that he was rounded up with other civilians.
The Israeli assault has obliterated much of Gaza City and surrounding areas in the north. Still, tens of thousands of residents are believed to remain there, though the UN says it cannot confirm exact numbers. Some are unable to move, others refuse to leave their homes, saying the overcrowded south is no safer or fearing they will not be allowed to return.
Heavy fighting has been underway for days in the Jabaliya refugee camp and the Gaza City district of Shujaiya. The UN said Jabaliya's Al Awda Hospital — one of two hospitals still operating in the north — was surrounded by Israeli forces and sustained damage due to Israeli shelling. It said Israeli sniper fire into the hospital has also been reported.
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"Airstrikes and random artillery shelling have continued intensely since last night until this morning," said Hassan Al Najjar, a journalist speaking by phone from northern Gaza.
On Thursday in Shujaiya, a prominent poet and English professor, Refaat Alareer, was killed, along with his brother, sister and her four children, when Israeli shelling hit the house they were staying in, according to colleagues at "We Are Not Numbers," a nonprofit he helped found.
Days earlier, Alareer wrote on X that his walls were shaking with the thunder of bombing, shelling and gunfire that were drawing closer. The last poem he wrote and shared on social media read, "If I must die/ let it bring hope/ let it be a tale."
The military says it makes every effort to spare civilians and accuses Hamas of using them as human shields as the militants fight in dense residential areas.
There has also been a dramatic surge in deadly military raids and an increase in restrictions on Palestinian residents in the occupied West Bank since the start of the war.
Israeli forces stormed into a refugee camp Friday in the West Bank to arrest suspected Palestinian militants, unleashing fighting with local gunmen in which six Palestinians were killed, health officials said. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the operation.
Impending catastrophe
The continuation of tough fighting in the north raises fears that Israel's move south to uproot Hamas will wreak similar devastation.
Earlier this week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used a rarely exercised power to warn the Security Council of an impending "humanitarian catastrophe," and Arab and predominantly Muslim nations have called for a vote Friday on a council resolution to demand an immediate cease-fire.
The United States, Israel's closest ally, appears likely to block any UN effort to halt the fighting, which was triggered by the deadly Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel.
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But US concern over the devastation is growing.
US officials told Israel ahead of the expansion of its ground offensive into southern Gaza that it must limit civilian deaths and displacement after the high death toll in the north.
Israel's focus the past week has been on Khan Younis, the territory's second-largest city. On Friday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said Israel's air force attacked a home facing the society's office in Khan Younis. It did not give details about casualties.
Tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting have packed into the border city of Rafah, in the far south of the Gaza Strip, and Muwasi, a nearby patch of barren coastline. Israel has designated Muwasi as a safe zone. But the UN and relief agencies have called that a poorly planned solution.
With shelters significantly beyond capacity, many people pitched tents along the side of the road leading from Rafah to Muwasi. "We do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name anymore," the UN's humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, said Thursday.
The pace of Israel's military assault "has made no place safe for civilians in southern Gaza, which had been a cornerstone of the humanitarian plan to protect civilians and thus to provide aid to them. But without places of safety, that plan is in tatters."
Israel's campaign has killed more than 17,400 people in Gaza — 70% of them women and children — and wounded more than 46,000, according to the territory's Health Ministry, which says many others are trapped under rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.
Hamas and other militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack and took more than 240 hostages. More than 130 hostages remain in Gaza, predominately soldiers and civilian men, after more than 100 were freed, most during a cease-fire last month. The military says 93 of its troops have been killed in the ground campaign.
