Israel ‘Expanding’ Ground Operations in Gaza, Military Says

Israeli air and ground forces are stepping up operations in the Gaza Strip, Israel‘s chief military spokesperson said on Friday, amid reports of heavy bombing of the besieged enclave.

Internet and mobile phone services were cut off in the Palestinian territory, a local telecoms firm and the Red Crescent said.

“In the last hours, we intensified the attacks in Gaza,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a televised news briefing.

He said the air force was conducting extensive strikes on tunnels and other infrastructure.

“In addition to the attacks carried out in the last few days, ground forces are expanding their operations tonight,” he said, raising the question of whether a long-anticipated ground invasion of Gaza may be beginning.

White House spokesman John Kirby said he had seen reports about Israel expanding its ground operations in Gaza but would not comment on that.

Israeli forces have massed outside Gaza, where Israel has been conducting an intense campaign of air strikes since a deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, the terrorist group in control of the neighboring Palestinian enclave. Hamas terrorists invaded the Jewish state and killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Earlier on Friday, Palestinian mobile phone service provider Jawwal said that services including phone and internet had been cut by heavy bombardment.

A statement from the Palestine Red Crescent Society said it had completely lost contact with its operations room in Gaza and all its teams operating on the ground.

But while Israel announced a step up in operations, White House spokesman Kirby said the US supports a pause in Israeli military activity in Gaza to get humanitarian aid, fuel, and electricity to civilians there.

Kirby also said that if getting more than 200 hostages abducted by Hamas from Israel out of Gaza requires a localized temporary pause, then the United States is in support of that.

GAZA BOMBARDMENT

Israel has said it has been preparing a ground offensive into Gaza, but has been urged by the US and Arab countries to delay an operation that would multiply the number of civilian casualties in the densely populated coastal strip and might ignite a wider conflict.

The Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has said Israeli strikes have killed thousands of civilians. Israel began its aerial campaign against Hamas targets in Gaza following the Oct. 7 massacre. The terrorist group has notoriously used civilians as human shields, in many cases blocking them from evacuating and placing their weapons and other military targets by civilian sites.

Concerns about a risk of a wider Middle East conflict have risen in recent days with the US dispatching more military assets to the region as Israel struck terrorist targets in Gaza, as well as Lebanon and Syria.

Israeli leaders have vowed to wipe out Hamas, the Islamist group that has run Gaza since 2007, and kill the leaders and planners of the Oct. 7 assault.

With Israel keeping up daily bombings, Palestinians said they received renewed Israeli military warnings to move from Gaza’s north to the south to avoid the deadliest theater of the war.

Gazans say making the journey south remains highly risky. Many families have refused to leave their homes.

NORTHERN FRONT

Strategically, Gaza operations may be complicated by the need to protect Israel‘s northern border, where Israeli forces have been engaged in days of sporadic cross-border fire into southern Lebanon and Syria.

Israel and its ally the United States have warned the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon not to intervene and Washington has dispatched two aircraft carriers to the region to reinforce the message.

Hamas, backed by Israel‘s main regional enemy Iran, has had years to prepare its defenses. Over the years, Israel has uncovered a sophisticated network of tunnels and Hamas has fired missiles at Israel since launching the Oct. 7 attack.

Hundreds of fighters and many commanders have been killed, the Israeli military says, but those who remain sheltered in the tunnels will have a ruined urban landscape to use as cover when the battle opens.

Now, in addition to potentially heavy casualties among their own troops, Israel‘s leaders face the dilemma of what to do about the hostages, an issue the military says is being handled at the highest levels of government.