Hamas pre-evacuates Rafah personnel, Israel to increase Gaza water supply

Germany and the Netherlands followed Canada in urging their citizens to leave Lebanon, fearing that an all-out war could break out with Israel.

“German citizens are urgently requested to leave Lebanon,” the country’s embassy in Lebanon warned on its website. It noted that air traffic might be halted in such a situation, and if so, it may not be possible to leave.

Third Lebanon War

The United States worked Wednesday to prevent a Third Lebanon War as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visited Washington.

“What we’re trying to do is prevent a second front from opening up,” US National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby told reporters.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Gallant on Wednesday to discuss the issue, after speaking Tuesday with US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin. Sullivan affirmed the US’s “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security, including in the face of threats from Iranian-backed terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah,” his office said.

The two men discussed “ongoing US efforts to support de-escalation and a diplomatic resolution to the ongoing hostilities in Lebanon that would ensure the return of both Israeli and Lebanese families to their homes in the border region,” his office added.

Gallant’s office said they also discussed “the important cooperation between Israel and the United States vis-a-vis Iranian aggression and its nuclear ambitions.”

Concern is high that the IDF-Hezbollah war that began after the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, which has focused on cross-border violence, will escalate and lead to a regional war that would actively include Iran.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Israel on Monday and Beirut on Tuesday in an effort to understand and describe the situation. “With every rocket across the Blue Line between [Lebanon and Israel], the danger grows that a miscalculation could trigger a hot war from one moment to the next. All who bear responsibility must exercise extreme restraint,” she wrote on X from Beirut.

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said his country stood in solidarity with Lebanon amid growing tensions with Israel and, on Wednesday, called on regional countries to support Beirut.

In a speech to his AK Party’s lawmakers in parliament, Erdogan claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to spread the Gaza war throughout the region.”It seems that Israel has now turned its eyes on Lebanon after destroying and burning Gaza. We see Western countries giving Israel support behind the scenes,” Erdogan said.

“Netanyahu’s plans to spread the war to the region will lead to a big catastrophe,” he said, adding that Western support for Israel was “pitiful”.

“Turkey stands with the brotherly people and state of Lebanon. I call on other countries in the region to stand in solidarity with Lebanon,” he stated.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz retorted in a post on X that Erdogan “is a war criminal who slaughters innocent Kurds across the Syrian border and tries to deny Israel its right to self-defense against a terror organization attacking from Lebanon under Iran’s orders.”

Earlier this week, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, commenting on the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, said the Turkish government saw a risk of the conflict spreading.

When asked about Hezbollah’s threat to Cyprus, the EU member state in closest proximity to Lebanon, Fidan called on Cyprus to “stay away” from the conflict.

Turkey’s intelligence reports showed Cyprus had become a base for “certain countries’” military and reconnaissance flights over Gaza, Fidan said in an interview with private Haberturk television.

Cyprus has said it is “in no way involved” in the conflict. It has lobbied its EU partners to offer Lebanon financial assistance and recently set up a maritime corridor to dispatch humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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RAFAH, Gaza – In a first since the start of the Gaza war, Hamas may have pre-evacuated many of the Palestinian civilians in Rafah before the IDF fully invaded, IDF Col. and Nahal Brigade Commander Yair Zuckerman told The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Rafah on Wednesday.

Zuckerman said that he believed Hamas itself pressed for an earlier and quicker evacuation to gain more time to set more booby traps for the IDF once it entered the area.

Zuckerman’s analytical point, if true, would mark a stunning turn of events.

In all prior battles with Hamas – whether in northern Gaza, central Gaza, or Khan Yunis – the Gazan terror group pushed to prevent Palestinian civilians from following evacuation orders.

There were even numerous documented cases in which civilians who were able to speak to the IDF or terrorists who were later captured admitted that large groups of civilians had been held as human shields.

In fact, a cornerstone of Hamas’s strategy was to keep as many civilians as possible nearby to deter Israel from attacking or to increase the likelihood of their own people dying in the crossfire in order to later blame Israel on the world stage.

Against all logic

As such, the idea that Hamas would “assist” the IDF by helping evacuate the 1.4 million civilians who were in Rafah goes against everything that has been known about Hamas’s strategy from October 2023 until last month.

It would seem even stranger in Rafah because the US managed to delay the IDF’s invasion of the city for four months, in no small part based on the idea that an invasion would lead to the largest killing of civilians since the start of the war due to the high volume of people there.

Zuckerman defended his analysis, noting that Hamas’s booby-trapping of Rafah was far more extensive than anywhere else in the Gaza Strip. He said he thought it was unlikely that Hamas would have been able to integrate the number of booby traps into civilians’ homes that the IDF encountered once it invaded if the civilians were still living there.

Supporting Zuckerman’s argument, the international community was surprised at the speed with which the vast majority of the civilians evacuated Rafah, as was the IDF.

The US predicted that evacuating 1.4 million people would take four months, while the IDF expected it to take four weeks. Ultimately, it took only two weeks.

Zuckerman’s theory could help explain why the evacuation went faster than the IDF expected.

And if Hamas believed, based on the many other experiences it had with evacuation successes, that an evacuation was inevitable anyway, at least using the extra time to set up a much larger apparatus of booby traps would be some achievement.

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The IDF struck a building on Wednesday night in the city of Nabatieh, located in southern Lebanon, according to  Wednesday Israeli media reports citing Arab media.

Initial reports say that a building was damaged in the area. The purpose of the strike has not been disclosed yet.

This is a developing story.

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Air defense systems were activated on Wednesday night in the Damascus area of Syria due to an aircraft attack, killing two people and wounding a soldier, Syrian state media said early on Thursday.

Syrian reports described echoes of explosions in the sky of the town Set Zaynab, located south of Damascus. Reports said that the Kol Habira website, affiliated with the Syrian opposition, published a video of the alleged Israeli attack. 

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Israel, under pressure from Western allies to ease a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, is preparing to boost electricity to a desalination plant so it can produce more water for people in the enclave, an Israeli security official and a Western official told Reuters on Wednesday.

An Israeli offensive launched on Gaza in response to an October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas has left millions in Gaza with little food, scarce water, and failing sanitation, Western aid agencies say.

Washington and other allies are pressing the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ease the military offensive and allow in more aid and supplies to relieve the humanitarian crisis.

The Israeli plan, the details of which were shown to Reuters, is to directly supply electricity from Israel to a large water desalination facility in Khan Yunis, the two sources said.

The facility was established with United Nations funding in 2017 to provide drinking water to areas in Deir al-Balah, Khan Yunis and the Mawasi area, where many Gazans have fled due to fighting.

Increasing water supply

The facility has a production capacity of about 20,000 cubic meters of water per day, while today the facility provides only some 1,500 cubic meters due to the lack of electricity. Gaza depends on Israel for much of its electricity supply. That power has been cut since the fighting started.

The Israeli source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the planned supply of electricity to the water plant could provide water for just under a million people.

The source did not give a deadline for when the power supply would come online. Current power comes from generators and solar panels.

The source said the plan has been approved by both the Israeli prime minister and the Israeli minister of defense but still requires approval from other ministers in the government.

“There are parties who are trying to cancel the process,” the source said without providing details.

The Israeli prime minister’s office declined a request for comment.

A Western official familiar with the plan, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said preparations were being made to restore the power to the plant.

The official said that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant approved the reopening of the power line when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with him in Israel earlier this month.

“The Israelis are ready on their side,” said the official. “Right now, Palestinian engineers are inside the strip checking the integrity of the line.”

The official said restoring power to the line that feeds the desalination plant was a crucial element in alleviating the water crisis in Gaza, but would not solve the issue.

There was still a need to get in equipment to fix the sanitation system, and this was hampered by the fighting, the official said.

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