Israeli military officials accused Hamas of launching rockets aimed at Israel from one of the “humanitarian zones” in southern Gaza.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said Hamas launched more than a dozen rockets from the al Mawasi humanitarian zone toward the Israeli city of Beersheba on Wednesday afternoon in multiple launches. He also said at least one rocket misfired and put Palestinian civilians in danger.
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“The Hamas terrorist organization abuses the people of Gaza, utilizing them for its acts of terror. Hamas cynically embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, schools, residential areas, near United Nations facilities, and even in humanitarian zones — using the civilians as a human shield,” Hagari explained.
The IDF released videos and maps of Gaza, including the humanitarian zone officials claim the rockets were launched from, but the Washington Examiner could not independently verify their claims.
Israeli leaders have long accused Hamas of operating within civilian areas and embedding themselves within noncombatant and protected population centers, including hospitals, schools, and religious centers. The United States has supported Israeli claims that Hamas was operating underneath the Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, which Israeli forces gained control of last month.
The IDF also recently released a photo of 11 men it said were leaders of the Northern Gaza Brigade, the second largest unit in Hamas, per the IDF, and said five of them had been killed. These militants were killed in an attack on a Hamas tunnel where they were “hiding under civilian homes and close to the Indonesian hospital,” the military said.
Israeli forces are conducting operations in southern Gaza in their efforts to capture or kill Hamas leaders who were responsible for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel that sparked the conflict. The Israeli military has set up small safe spaces for civilians to travel to in an attempt to stay out of the crossfire of the war, though the south is more densely populated now after Israel urged more than a million civilians in the northern part of the area to evacuate south.
The Israeli military operation, which is now 2 months old, has resulted in the deaths of roughly 15,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry. An Israeli military spokesman said this week the death toll for civilians to combatants is 2-to-1, which underscores the near-impossible task of fighting in an urban environment against an adversary that hides behind civilians in a densely populated area.
President Joe Biden and top administration officials have repeatedly urged Israel to do more to prevent civilian casualties, and they want Israel to do more.
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“I think we are still at an early stage of this part of the conflict, this part of the conflict in southern Gaza. You heard the secretary say that too many Palestinian civilians have been killed,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Wednesday. “That remains the case: Too many Palestinian civilians have been killed, too many Palestinians have been killed — or, I should say, too many Palestinian civilians continue to be killed. We want to see the civilian death toll lower than it has been. We want to see the civilian death toll lower than it is today, lower than it has been the past few days.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was personally involved in the battle against the Islamic State, which took place under similar conditions, warned last week, “In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population, and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”
