Israel issues threat to Hamas leader amid new Gaza offensive: ‘No tunnel is deep enough, Sinwar’

Israel has not forgotten Gaza amid its offensive on Lebanon. “No tunnel is deep enough, Sinwar. Ask Nasrallah,” warn the leaflets, written in Arabic and dropped on the Strip, carrying the threat to Yahya Sinwar and stating that the same fate awaits the Hamas leader as Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed on September 28 in an airstrike on Beirut. Along with these threats, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are maintaining pressure on Gaza, where close-quarters clashes with the Palestinian armed resistance continue and where local health authorities reported Wednesday that the death toll from the war in the Strip has now exceeded 42,000, most of them civilians.

In the north of the Strip, Israel has launched a new offensive in an area it has already devastated several times in the past year. The IDF has been shelling, troops have advanced on the largest refugee camp, Jabalia, and orders have been issued to expel the inhabitants amid threats to evacuate and close the hospitals. At the same time, 100 Israeli hostages remain in the hands of Hamas, while Sinwar has not been captured or killed, although he is believed to be in southern Gaza. “There will be no safe place underground, nor on the surface of the Earth,” add the leaflets dropped from the air, as reported by the Israeli press.

On Tuesday, the authorities at the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia were warned by the Israeli military, stationed nearby, that they had 24 hours to evacuate the center of staff and patients, a deadline that expires on Wednesday, according to a recorded message from the hospital’s director, Hossam Abu Safia. Health authorities in the Strip, under the authority of Hamas, reported that these threats have extended to the Indonesian and Al Awda hospitals. They also reported the deaths of 45 people in the last 24 hours, which has taken the toll in the war to over 42,000. These three medical centers, the main ones in the north of Gaza, currently have a total of 317 patients, of whom some 80 are in intensive care, warns Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

In parallel, the IDF has issued new evacuation orders to the inhabitants of three large urban centres in the north: Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanun, which Israel justifies with the argument of preventing Hamas from regrouping and rebuilding its capacities. The refugee camp, where the Israeli army claims to have killed dozens of members of the armed resistance in the last few hours, has been assaulted by tanks and soldiers and is experiencing what some residents describe as the worst fighting since last May.

“Soldiers are shooting at anyone who moves,” the Red Crescent warns, referring to areas west of Jabalia, which makes it impossible for the organization to respond to calls from the wounded. Since Tuesday, the siege of the refugee camp has been tightened with earthen barriers and checkpoints to control entry and exit, after a ban on food, water, and medicine was imposed a few days earlier, denounces the Palestinian NGO Al Mezan, which believes that this is part of “the systematic elimination of the Palestinian presence.”

“These forced mass evacuations of homes and the bombing of neighborhoods by Israeli forces are turning the north of Gaza into an unlivable wasteland” where no outside help has arrived since October 1, MSF said in a statement. “Suddenly, I was told that we had to leave the north,” said Mahmoud, a security guard for the humanitarian organization, who left Jabalia to take refuge in a house run by the NGO in Gaza City, according to a recorded testimony. Like him, six other employees have escaped from the north in recent hours. “We left our house in despair, under the bombs, missiles and artillery. It was very, very difficult. I would rather die than be displaced to the south; my home is here and I don’t want to leave,” added the MSF employee.

The United Nations has criticized these forced displacements from the “hell” that northern Gaza has become in the past few months, where 400,000 people are trapped, says Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), citing in particular the largest refugee camp in the Strip, Jabalia, where Israeli troops claim to have killed dozens of “terrorists” in recent days. “Many are refusing [to leave] because they know too well that no place anywhere in Gaza is safe,” Lazzarini insists, referring to the constant dance to which the Israeli authorities are subjecting the inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave, a strategy they are also putting into practice in Lebanon.

The area in southern Gaza where Israel is trying to push the remaining inhabitants of the north — Al Mawasi and the central city of Deir al-Balah — is overcrowded with more than a million people and does not meet the minimum conditions for habitation, insists MSF.

Amid military pressure, UNRWA shelters and services in the north are being “forced to close,” some for the first time since the war began, adds Lazzarini, exacerbating food shortages in an area where it has already been a problem for months. At the same time, the UNRWA chief warned in a statement, the military operation is putting the second phase of polio vaccination among children at risk.

Since the Israeli army invaded the Strip at the end of October 2023, it has systematically had to return to areas of the Palestinian enclave where it considered Hamas resistance to be eliminated. This is now happening again in the north, while the IDF is maintaining its operations “throughout the Strip” and has killed “dozens of terrorists in close-range clashes and airstrikes,” a statement said.

Gaza and Lebanon are two theaters, less than 125 miles apart, that are part of the same war entering its second year shrouded in uncertainty. Israel maintains its military machinery deployed on the ground on both battlefields. In addition to its invasion of the south, Israel has increased the pressure on Lebanon in the last three weeks with intense bombing in different regions, an unprecedented attack targeting thousands of Hezbollah communication devices, assassinations of the party-militia’s top leadership, and a ground invasion involving thousands of troops. Over 2,000 people have been killed and more than a million displaced.

The same uncertainty that surrounds the recently launched invasion of Lebanon continues to weigh on Gaza one year after the war began. Not only are there no signs of troops withdrawing, but operations such as the one in the north point to a possible total expulsion of the population to strengthen the grip of the Israeli occupation. The Israeli government plans being hatched for the post-war Strip, a territory freed from the power that the ballot box gave to Hamas, seem increasingly distant when there is not even a glimpse of an agreement that would allow for the release of the hostages.

In order to address that future, a provisional authority in the Palestinian-controlled Strip to serve as a transitional body to the new government is “vital and urgent,” says Said Zeedani, a retired philosophy professor at Al Quds University, in an article published in +972 Magazine. This administration, which would serve as a temporary hinge, would include “national figures” respected and accepted by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority, although without their leaders, and authorities from those states that will be the pillars of reconstruction.

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