Army says it withdraws troops from southern Gaza after months of fighting (File)
Israel withdrew ground troops from the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday, media reports said, a partial withdrawal six months after the devastating war sparked by an Oct. 7 attack.
But the military said a “significant force” would continue to operate elsewhere in the besieged Palestinian territory and could “carry out intelligence-based precision operations”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was “one step away from victory” and vowed the fighting would not stop until Hamas releases all hostages.
“There will be no ceasefire if the hostages are not returned. It won’t happen,” he told his cabinet as new ceasefire talks were about to begin in Cairo.
Netanyahu stressed that “Israel is ready to reach a deal, but not ready to surrender.”
Witnesses said nighttime airstrikes continued to hit Khan Younis and Rafah.
The army said it was withdrawing troops from southern Gaza after months of fighting that reduced the city of Khan Younis, the hometown of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, to rubble.
“The 98th Commando Division has completed its mission in Khan Younis,” the military told AFP. “The division left the Gaza Strip to recuperate and prepare for future operations.”
An army official told Haaretz that troops withdrew after “disbanding Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade and killing thousands of its members.
“We did everything we could out there.”
News of the partial withdrawal came on a day when talks on a ceasefire and hostage release deal were expected to resume in Cairo, involving U.S., Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
Egypt’s Al-Qahera News reported that CIA Director Bill Burns and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani will be Join Egyptian officials in indirect talks between Israeli and Hamas delegations.
Netanyahu has long threatened to launch a ground offensive against the city of Rafah in Gaza’s southernmost tip, sparking concerns around the world, including in the United States, Israel’s top ally.
As many as 1.5 million Palestinians have flooded into Egypt’s border areas, many of them living in tents. AFP images showed dozens of people leaving Rafah on foot, in cars and donkey carts heading back to Khan Younis on Sunday after Israel withdrew its troops.
U.S. President Joe Biden, angered by an Israeli attack that killed seven aid workers at a U.S. food charity, told Netanyahu on Thursday he wanted to see a ceasefire and hostage release deal, as well as increased aid deliveries.
The Biden administration, Israel’s largest arms supplier and political backer, has also suggested that U.S. support for Israel is conditional on reducing the killing of civilians and improving humanitarian conditions.
“Bodies under the rubble”
AFP television footage showed several aid trucks entering southern Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Sunday, their drivers honking their horns as crowds chased them.
On April 1, seven aid workers from the US food charity World Central Kitchen were killed in an airstrike in Gaza, sparking intense international outrage in Israel.
British Prime Minister Sunak also called for “this terrible conflict to end.”
Mohammed Younis, a 51-year-old father of six in northern Gaza, told AFP the region’s 2.4 million people desperately needed relief from bombing and suffering.
“It’s been half a year and the bombing and starvation are still going on,” said the man from Beit Lahiya, which is now a devastated ruin.
“Looking at the children’s skinny bodies taking away our souls… I felt helpless and humiliated,” he said.
“Isn’t the bombing, death and destruction enough? There are bodies under the rubble. We can smell the stench.”
UNICEF President Catherine Russell noted that more than 13,000 children were reportedly among the victims.
“Houses, schools and hospitals have been destroyed. Teachers, doctors and humanitarians have been killed. Famine is imminent,” she said on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday.
“The extent and speed of the destruction is shocking. The children need a ceasefire now.”
The hospital is an “empty shell”
Israeli data shows that the war in Gaza broke out on October 7 when Hamas militants launched unprecedented attacks that killed 1,170 people, mostly civilians.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants have also taken more than 250 hostages, and 129 remain in Gaza, 34 of whom the military said were dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 33,175 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-controlled region.
Large swathes of Gaza have been reduced to a ruin-strewn wasteland, and its people are plunged into a dire humanitarian crisis amid the Israeli siege.
Gaza receives only sporadic aid through road crossings with Egypt, airdrops and two sea shipments, which aid agencies warn falls far short of urgent needs.
Under pressure from the United States, Israel pledged to allow aid to be delivered through its Erez border crossing with northern Gaza for the first time.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said most hospitals in Gaza have ceased functioning and that Al-Shifa, the largest, “is now an empty shell. Full of human graves.”
mass protest
Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces intense pressure at home from the hostages’ families and supporters, as well as a resurgent anti-government protest movement.
Tens of thousands of people rallied in Tel Aviv and other cities on Saturday to demand “immediate elections.”
One of the protesters was centrist Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party said he later traveled to Washington.
Lapid is expected to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fierce critic of Netanyahu.
Concerns that the war could spread have grown after Iran vowed to retaliate against seven Revolutionary Guardsmen who were killed in an airstrike last Monday on its embassy and consulate in Damascus.
The ISNA news agency quoted Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as saying that “the Zionist regime’s embassy is no longer safe.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
