Hamas warns Rafah operation ‘won’t be a picnic,’ says Gaza truce talks in jeopardy
Netanyahu, Biden speak by phone as Washington scrambles to get fizzling hostage release deal negotiations back on track and prevent looming ground offensive in Gaza’s southern city
Hamas issued a warning against a military operation in Rafah on Monday, after Israel began calling on Palestinians to evacuate parts of the southern Gaza city ahead of a planned ground offensive and as Washington mounts a diplomatic offensive to get talks to secure a temporary truce and hostage release back on track.
“We confirm that any military offensive in Rafah will not be a picnic to the fascist occupation army,” the terror group said in a statement. “Our brave resistance on top of them, the Qassam Brigades, is fully prepared to defend our people and defeat this enemy.”
US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the phone for 30 minutes on Monday evening, an American official told the Times of Israel.
Israeli officials have said Hamas has six remaining battalions in the Gaza Strip, four of them in Rafah: Yabna (South), Shaboura (North), Tel Sultan (West), and East Rafah. Two more Hamas battalions remain in central Gaza, in the Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah camps.
More than a million Palestinian civilians are sheltering in Rafah. Around 100,000 were estimated to be in the zone where the Israel Defense Forces called for evacuation, Army Radio reported.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri warned that the “dangerous escalation” would have consequences, while charging that the United States, along with Israel, “bears responsibility for this terrorism.”
Another Hamas official, Izzat al-Rashiq, said that the operation would put negotiations to secure a hostage release and temporary ceasefire deal in jeopardy, though intensive efforts by the US, Egypt and Qatar to mediate an agreement between Israel and Hamas appeared to collapse over the weekend.
The London-based Qatari outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed quoted an unnamed Hamas source as saying that the terror group would not be returning to Cairo for continued talks, “pending the results of the mediators’ efforts.”
CIA chief William Burns was also in Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and the war leadership on Monday, while Jordan’s King Abdullah II was due at the White House for lunch.
Biden told Netanyahu in April that invading Rafah would be a “mistake,” and Washington has said it does not support an offensive without a credible plan to aid some 1.2 million civilians sheltering there.
A spokesman for the White House National Security Council said Monday that talks were “ongoing,” and added, “We continue to believe that a hostage deal is the best way to preserve the lives of the hostages, and avoid an invasion of Rafah, where more than a million people are sheltering.”
Washington believes the evacuation orders came in response to a rocket strike by Hamas that killed four IDF soldiers on Sunday. State-linked media in Egypt reported that the hostage deal negotiations had stalled after the deadly attack.
A statement from the office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday called on Washington to stop Israel from conducting the large-scale operation in Rafah to prevent a “massacre.”
“We call on the American administration to intervene immediately to prevent this massacre… (and) we warn of its dangerous repercussions,” the PA presidency said in a statement, published by the official Wafa news agency, as the Palestinian Red Crescent said that “thousands” of Gazans had began to evacuate Rafah’s the eastern neighborhoods.
A map published by the IDF on Monday showed that the zones to be evacuated included the Rafah crossing area on the Egyptian border. Three of Hamas’s Rafah battalions — Yabna, Shaboura, and East Rafah — are also located in the area that was being evacuated.
Meanwhile, Egyptian security sources said Cairo on Monday raised its military’s level of preparedness in northern Sinai, which borders the Gaza Strip, after Israel started to drop flyers in eastern Rafah, send text messages, and make phone calls to Palestinians with evacuation instructions.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Egyptian officials had warned the decades-long peace treaty between Egypt and Israel could be suspended if Israel Defense Forces’ troops enter Rafah, or if any of Rafah’s refugees are forced southward into the Sinai Peninsula.
Amid a chorus of international dissent, France charged that the evacuation of Gazan civilians amounts to a war crime.
“France reiterates that it is strongly opposed to an Israeli offensive on Rafah, where more than 1.3 million people are taking refuge in a situation of great distress,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement. “The forced displacement of a civilian population constitutes a war crime.”
UNICEF also warned against the evacuation of some 600,000 children packed into Rafah.
“Given the high concentration of children in Rafah… UNICEF is warning of a further catastrophe for children, with military operations resulting in very high civilian casualties and the few remaining basic services and infrastructure they need to survive being totally destroyed,” the United Nations children’s agency said in a statement.
It said Gaza’s youth were already “on the edge of survival,” with many in Rafah already displaced multiple times and with nowhere else to go.
“More than 200 days of war have taken an unimaginable toll on the lives of children,” said UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell.
The expanded humanitarian zone in the al-Mawasi and Khan Younis areas, where Rafah civilians are instructed to shelter during the military operation, includes field hospitals and tent camps for displaced Palestinians, with the IDF saying that “there has been a surge of humanitarian aid going into Gaza” recently.
The war in Gaza erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 252 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Vowing to destroy the terror group and return the hostages, over 100 of whom remain in captivity, Israel launched a wide-scale offensive in the Strip that Hamas-run authorities say has killed at least 34,735 Palestinians.
The figures issued by the Hamas-run health ministry cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. The IDF says it has killed over 13,000 operatives in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
267 soldiers have been killed during the ground offensive against Hamas and during operations along the Gaza border.
Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.
