CAIRO: Israel’s army is flattening the remaining ruins of the city of Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, residents say, in what they fear is a part of a plan to herd the population into confinement in a giant camp on the barren ground.

No food or medical supplies have reached the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip in nearly two months, since Israel imposed what has since become its longest ever total blockade of the territory, following the collapse of a six-week ceasefire.

Israel relaunched its ground campaign in mid-March and has since seized swaths of land and ordered residents out of what it says are “buffer zones” around Gaza’s edges, including all of Rafah, which comprises around 20 percent of the Strip.

Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported on Saturday that the military was setting up a new “humanitarian zone” in Rafah, to which civilians would be moved after security checks to keep out Hamas fighters. Private companies would distribute aid.

Residents said massive explosions could now be heard unceasingly from the dead zone where Rafah had once stood as a city of 300,000 people.

“Explosions never stop, day and night, whenever the ground shakes, we know they are destroying more homes in Rafah. Rafah is gone,” Tamer, a Gaza City man displaced in Deir Al-Balah, further north, told Reuters by text message.

He said he was getting phone calls from friends as far away as across the border in Egypt whose children were being kept awake by the explosions.

Abu Mohammed, another displaced man in Gaza, stated by text: “We are terrified that they could force us into Rafah, which is going to be like a cage of a concentration camp, completely sealed off from the world.”

Israel imposed its total blockade on Gaza on March 2.

UN agencies say Gazans are on the precipice of mass hunger and disease, with conditions now at their worst since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023.

Gaza health officials said on Monday that at least 23 people had been killed in the latest Israeli strikes across the Strip.

At least 10, some of them children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia in the north and six were killed in an airstrike on a cafe in the south. 

Footage circulating on social media showed some victims critically injured as they sat around a table at the cafe.

Talks have so far failed to extend the ceasefire, during which Hamas released 38 hostages and Israel released hundreds of prisoners and detainees.

Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in Gaza, fewer than half of them believed to be alive. Hamas says it would free them only under a deal that ended the war; Israel says it will agree only to temporary pauses in fighting unless Hamas is completely disarmed, which the fighters reject.

On Friday, the World Food Programme said it had run out of food stocks in Gaza after the longest closure the Gaza Strip had ever faced.

Some residents toured the streets looking for weeds that grow naturally on the ground. 

Others picked up dry leaves from trees. 

Desperate enough, fishermen turned to catching turtles, skinning them, and selling their meat.

“I went to the doctor the other day, and he said I had some stones in my kidney and I needed surgery that would cost me around $300. I told him I would rather use a painkiller and use the money to buy food for my children,” one Gaza City woman said.

“There is no meat, no cooking gas, no flour, and no life. This is Gaza in simple but painful terms.” 

Since October 2023, Israel’s offensive on the enclave has killed more than 51,400, according to Palestinian health officials.

JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said Monday that it had struck more than 50 “terror targets” across Lebanon over the past month, despite a November ceasefire that ended a war between it and Hezbollah militants.
On Sunday, Israel struck south Beirut for the third time since the fragile November 27 ceasefire went into effect, prompting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to call on its guarantors France and the United States to force a halt.
“Over the past month, the IDF (military) has struck more than 50 terror targets across Lebanon. These strikes were carried out following violations of the ceasefire and understandings between Israel and Lebanon, which posed a threat to the State of Israel and its citizens,” the military said in a statement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday’s strike targeted a building used by Hezbollah to store “precision-guided missiles,” and vowed to stop the Iran-backed militant group from using Beirut’s southern suburbs as a “safe haven.”
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said in a speech Monday that the attack “lacks any justification,” going on to call it “a political attack aimed at changing the rules by force.”
Israel has continued to carry out regular strikes in Lebanon despite the truce, which sought to halt more than a year of hostilities with Hezbollah that culminated in a heavy Israeli bombing campaign and ground incursion.
Under the deal, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters north of Lebanon’s Litani River, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli border, and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure to its south.
Israel was to withdraw all its forces from south Lebanon, but troops remain in five positions that it deems “strategic.”