CAIRO: Ahead of a UN Security Council vote, Israeli forces signalled they were widening their ground offensive with a new push into central Gaza on Friday.

As hopes faded for an imminent breakthrough in talks this week in Egypt aimed at getting Israel and Hamas to agree to a new truce, air strikes, artillery bombardments and fighting were reported across the Palestinian enclave.

Israel’s military on Friday ordered residents of Al-Bureij, in central Gaza, to move south immediately, indicating a new focus of the ground assault that has already devastated the north of the Strip and made a series of incursions in the south.

At least 20,057 Palestinians have been killed and 53,320 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since Oct. 7, the health ministry said on Friday.

MSF says northern part of Gaza Strip ‘turned into a pile of rubble by indiscriminate Israeli strikes’

“After more than two months of the war, Israel’s indiscriminate strikes on Gaza have turned the north of the Strip into a pile of rubble,” medical charity MSF said in a post on X. “In Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, south Gaza, the dead and wounded continue to arrive almost every day... Nowhere is safe.” The Israeli military has expressed regret for civilian deaths but blamed Iran-backed Hamas for operating in densely populated areas or using civilians as human shields, an allegation the group denies.

In the latest accounts of fighting on Friday, residents reported Israeli tank shelling of eastern areas of Al-Bureij, the subject of the latest military evacuation order.The Shehab news agency reported heavy shelling and air strikes on Jabalia al-Balad and Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, and that Israeli vehicles were trying to advance from the western side of Jabalia amid the sound of gunfire.

Air strikes were also reported in Khan Yunis and Rafah, in the south.

Reports in Palestinian media and footage shared by Gazans on social media showed bodies scattered in the street and some buried under rubble around the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.Around the Al Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, there were calls for worshippers to attend Friday prayers outside in defiance of orders that for weeks have limited access to the flashpoint site to women and the elderly.

Some mosques in East Jerusalem closed their doors on Friday and urged people to go to Al Aqsa and pray at the gates of the mosque “to break the siege”.

Police fired tear gas to disperse small groups of youths who gathered near the Old City and at mosques in East Jerusalem but police also distributed footage showing worshippers arriving calmly.

Published in Dawn, December 23rd, 2023