Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu audaciously said the military would invade Rafah in Gaza, despite ongoing global calls to refrain from conducting an offensive, amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis due to its attacks, which killed over 31,000 Palestinians since October.
"There is international pressure to prevent us from entering Rafah and completing the work," Netanyahu told soldiers on Thursday, according to his office.
He said he has been rejecting this pressure and will continue to do so.
"We will enter Rafah," Netanyahu was quoted as saying. "We will complete the elimination of Hamas' battalions. We will restore security and we will bring total victory for the people of Israel and State of Israel."
In Rafah, a city on the border with Egypt, an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians are currently seeking refuge from the fighting in other areas of the Gaza Strip in cramped conditions. Aid organizations are warning of many more civilian casualties if Israel launches a full-scale military operation there.
Many countries have been criticizing the actions of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip in light of its violations of international law and the dire humanitarian situation.
The U.S. has been firm with Israel over its concerns about Rafah, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that Washington had yet to receive from Israel its plans for civilians there.
"We need to see a plan that will get civilians out of harm's way if there's a military operation in Rafah," he told reporters in Washington after convening a virtual ministerial meeting on Gaza aid with officials from the U.N., the EU, Britain. Cyprus, Qatar and the UAE. "We've not yet seen such a plan."
At the start of the war, Israel directed evacuees to a slice of undeveloped land along Gaza's Mediterranean coast that it designated as a safe zone. But aid groups said there were no real plans in place to receive large numbers of displaced there. Israeli strikes also targeted the area.
More than 31,300 Palestinians, more than two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed in Gaza and most of its 2.3 million people forced from their homes, Gaza's Health Ministry says.
