Israel’s national security chief suggested a ground offensive was a certainty, saying Israel could not accept Hamas as a “sovereign entity in the Gaza Strip.”
By Shira Rubin, Steve Hendrix, John Hudson, Noga Tarnopolsky and Kareem Fahim, The Washington PostAn Israeli soldier is seen Oct. 14, 2023, on top of an Israeli tank near the border of the Gaza Strip. Photo for The Washington Post by Heidi Levine.
The Israeli military is preparing a “wide range of offensive operative plans” for Gaza, including attacks by land, sea and air, the Israeli government said in a statement Saturday. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met with soldiers on the Gaza border, said Saturday in a Facebook post that Israeli forces were “all ready.”
Biden also called for all countries to condemn Hamas “as a terrorist organization that does not represent the aspirations of the Palestinian people.” Soldiers in the area said they were preparing for Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza - but said they didn’t know when it would begin. One Israeli soldier from Tel Aviv, who asked only to be identified by his first name, Dan, because he was not authorized to speak to journalists, said, “There’s no way of possibly knowing when it’s going to come. We’re ready. We don’t have a choice not to be.”
A funeral procession was held Saturday in Lebanon for Issam Abdallah, a Reuters journalist who was killed Friday while working near Lebanon’s southern border on Friday. Six other journalists were injured in what colleagues said was Israeli shelling on the area they were reporting from. The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, said in a joint statement that Ali Kachi, a commander in the Nukhba force, who they said led one of the groups of attackers that infiltrated Israel last week, was killed in an airstrike.
Almost 1 million people have been displaced in Gaza over the last week, the U.N. said, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced in the past 12 hours alone. More than 2 million people are at risk as water supplies run out, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, saying: “It has become a matter of life and death.”Aid officials have pleaded for de-escalation.
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