Tel Aviv, 16 May. (Adnkronos) – Israel’s military operation in Rafah will intensify and more troops will be deployed. This was announced by the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, following a visit to the Gaza border, near Rafah.
“This operation will continue as additional forces arrive in the area. Several tunnels in the area have been destroyed by our forces and more tunnels will be destroyed soon,” Gallant said, according to a statement. “This operation will intensify and Hamas is now not an organization capable of regenerating itself. It has no reserves, it has no capacity to produce weapons, it has no supplies, it has no ammunition, it has no capacity to adequately treat wounded terrorists, and this means we are wearing it down,” Gallant added.
The Times of Israel had already reported this morning that the Israeli army had sent another brigade to Rafah, awaiting government approval to expand the offensive. The new contingent – he reported – was deployed during the night in the southern city of the Strip, joining the 162nd Division, which has been operating in the eastern part of the city since the beginning of this month.
Meanwhile, Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, blamed Israel for the current stalemate in Gaza ceasefire talks, saying their amendments to the proposal introduced by mediators Qatar and Egypt have “put the negotiations in a bind” impasse”. He reports it to Jazeera. “We recently announced our agreement on the proposal presented to us by our brothers in Egypt and Qatar, which was known to the American administration. But the Israeli occupation responded to this proposal by occupying and controlling the Rafah crossing and starting aggression in the Rafah area,” he said, rejecting any post-war solution in Gaza that excludes the group.
The president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas, for his part accused Hamas of having “given pretexts” to Israel to attack the Gaza Strip, which for over seven months has been the scene of a military offensive that began in the wake of the October 7 massacre and which has so far caused over 35 thousand deaths. “The military operation conducted unilaterally by Hamas on that day, October 7, gave Israel further pretexts and justifications to attack the Gaza Strip, killing, destroying and displacing hundreds of thousands of people,” Abbas said in his speech at Arab League summit in Bahrain.
39 people were killed in the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours alone. And since last October 7, the deaths in the Palestinian enclave would have been 35,272 according to the toll contained in the update released by the Ministry of Health of Gaza, which in 2007 ended up under the control of Hamas.
The IDF also announced that 5 Israeli soldiers were killed and seven others were injured, three of them seriously, in a ‘friendly fire’ incident that occurred last night in Jabaliya. And he explained that an Israeli army tank, which was operating alongside the paratroopers in the city camp in northern Gaza, fired two bullets at around 7pm at a building where the soldiers were gathered.
Five IDF soldiers were injured after being hit by a car in Haifa, in what police say was probably a road accident and not an intentional attack. The police say they have located the investor, who fled after running over the soldiers, and have started an investigation, even though it was probably an accident.
Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service reports that the five young men were taken to the city’s Rambam Medical Center. One of them is moderately injured with head and limb injuries, while the other four are slightly injured.
Furthermore, in the last 24 hours, Hezbollah carried out its deepest attack on Israeli territory, using two armed drones. One was shot down by Israeli air defenses and the other hit a “sensitive military structure near the Golani junction, west of Tiberias” about 35 km from the border with Lebanon, the IDF also announced.
Hezbollah says the attack was a response to recent Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon that killed its members. Israel responded to the Golani Junction attack by carrying out at least 15 attacks overnight in the Baalbeck region of eastern Lebanon. According to the army, the targets included a weapons manufacturing plant used to build guided weapons and a drone.
The Israeli border police instead foiled a stabbing attempt in Jerusalem, killing the attacker. The man rushed towards the soldiers with a knife after being stopped for an inspection, but was shot before he could injure any of them.
The US military’s Central Command (Centcom) announced that this morning a new temporary pier for humanitarian aid, built by the United States, was anchored on the beach in Gaza. Trucks carrying humanitarian assistance are expected to “begin disembarking in the coming days,” with the aid to be received and distributed by the United Nations, Centcom wrote on X.
