CAIRO/JERUSALEM, May 19 — Israeli planes and tanks pounded areas across the Gaza Strip, residents said, as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday amid US calls for a more focused military campaign.
Sullivan was expected to press for Israel to go after Hamas militants in a targeted way, not with a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the White House said before the discussions.
Israel has been pushing into the city that it says is the last bastion of Hamas forces. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled the area that was one of their few remaining places of refuge.
"Across the Gaza Strip, there is no safety," said Majid Omran, who told Reuters his family had fled Rafah and just returned to what was left of their home in the southern city of Khan Younis that they had fled nearly five months ago.
"We took our children, grandchildren, and daughters and we came and lived above the rubble of our home. Because there is no place to take refuge here,” Omran told Reuters inside the wrecked property as a woman cooked over a fire.
Israeli forces also pushed deeper into the narrow alleyways of Jabalia in northern Gaza overnight and into Sunday, returning to an area that they said they had cleared earlier in the conflict, residents said.
The Israeli military has said its operations in Jabalia — the largest of Gaza's eight historic refugee camps — are precise and meant to stop Hamas from reestablishing its grip there.
The Israeli military said it was "operating to identify armed terrorist cells and... conducting dozens of strikes to assist the forces operating on the ground" in the Jabalia area.
Washington worries for the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians sheltering in Rafah, and has cited a need not just to evacuate them but also to ensure adequate alternative accommodation.
At least 28 Palestinians were killed on Sunday, Gaza health officials and Hamas said, most of them in a strike on a house in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Civil Emergency Service said in a statement rescue teams have so far recovered the bodies of 150 Palestinians killed by the army in recent days, and that 300 houses had been struck by Israeli aerial and ground fire.
At least 35,386 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since October 7, according to the enclave's health ministry. Aid agencies have warned of widespread hunger and shortages of fuel and medical supplies.
— Reuters
