Israel's war with Hamas seems set to escalate as the country's military renewed a warning on Saturday for civilians in the densely populated northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, "to preserve your safety," ahead of a widely expected ground offensive.
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Missiles have rain down on the Palestinian territory for a week, since Hamas militants launched a brutal terror attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, firing thousand of rockets and storming into the Jewish state on a murderous rampage.
The combined death toll on both sides of the war climbed over 3,000 on Friday, rising precipitously in Gaza as the Israel Defense Forces hammered the region with missiles that it insists have all targeted Hamas.
Israel's military said Hamas' attack and ongoing rocket fire from Gaza had killed more than 1,300 people and left at least 3,200 wounded as of Friday. At least 27 Americans are known to be among the dead. In Gaza, the Health Ministry said Saturday that the Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 2,215 people, including 724 children, and left more than 8,714 others wounded.
The U.S. government says, meanwhile, that it's working with Israel and Egypt to get the only border crossing out of Gaza not sealed off by Israel — the Rafah crossing into northeast Egypt — opened for a limited time window Friday to enable U.S. nationals to escape the Palestinian territory. The State Department said it was in contact with some of the estimated 500-600 U.S. nationals in the enclave and it urged them to move toward Rafah if they believed they could do so safely.
A senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken Friday in Saudi Arabia that the U.S. was "trying to facilitate" a five-hour opening of the Egyptian-controlled Rafah border crossing from the Gaza Strip to enable civilians to flee the heavily-bombarded Palestinian territory.
"The Egyptians, the Israelis and the Qataris have been working with us on that," the official said, adding that it was "not clear at all if Hamas was going to allow people to make it to Rafah" from inside Gaza.
The U.S. official said the State Department was "in touch with a number of the roughly 500-600 [U.S.-Palestinian dual nationals]... who have expressed interest in receiving information about leaving" the coastal enclave, which has been subject to a complete Israeli blockade for a week. [CBS News]
