Israel clashes with Hamas terrorists widen as war expands

Israeli forces fought Hamas terrorists in southern Gaza as the conflict continued to escalate Saturday.

Hamas compounds and anti-tank launch positions were among 120 Gaza Strip targets hit during the course of the day, the Times of Israel reported.

In what the Israel Defense Forces called a “targeted raid” in southern Gaza – one of the first skirmishes in that part of the enclave – members of a Hamas cell emerged from a tunnel to attack tanks and combat engineers of the Gaza Division, who had arrived to map buildings and clear planted explosives.

The IDF shelled the fighters and killed an unknown number of them, the military said.

In other developments:

• IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi entered the war zone for his first meeting with front-line troops there. Halevi held an “assessment” with the commander of the 162nd Division and other officers, according to a video released by the IDF.

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attended a summit in Amman, Jordan with the foreign ministers of Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, who demanded an immediate Gaza cease-fire. “The whole region is sinking in a sea of hatred that will define generations to come,” said Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi. But Blinken argued that a cease-fire “would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7.”

• Israel shared a disturbing video of the bloody aftermath of Hamas’ massacre at the Tribe of Nova music festival to mark the fourth week since the Oct. 7 terror attack that sparked the war. “Don’t look away,” read the post on the country’s official X account, over footage of an IDF soldier discovering dozens of bloodied bodies of dead revelers in the desolate festival grounds.
• The family residence of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ senior political leader, was destroyed in an airstrike on the Shati refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Gaza City, Hamas-run media said. Haniyeh has lived in exile in Qatar since 2019, but the home was being used by his two sons, said a senior Hamas official.
• The IDF accused Hamas of firing at Israeli troops as they tried to secure a road for refugees fleeing south. The Salah a-Din road, a main Gaza Strip highway, was opened for a three-hour window Saturday to allow civilians to depart – but geolocated videos showed mortar and missile hits on a building where the troops were working, the IDF said. No injuries were reported.
• The Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, led by the flagship aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, arrived in the region Saturday, according to US Central Command.

In northern Gaza on Saturday, infantry and tanks encountered multiple groups of Hamas operatives who popped out of tunnels to strike Israeli troops. In one incident, the IDF said, forces on the ground fought off a group of 15 terrorists, killing several of them while shelling their observation posts.

Hamas claimed to have clashed with Israeli troops in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City — a sign that the IDF has already advanced well into the densely populated heart of Gaza, apparently in an effort to push all remaining civilians out and toward the south, according to the BBC.

But two Israeli airstrikes landed outside a United Nations school in Gaza City that had been turned into a shelter, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees reported, killing several civilians.

Meanwhile, the US Embassy in Lebanon issued a security alert urging Americans to leave the country as the IDF released dramatic footage showing Israeli warplanes striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon in response to a projectile fired from Lebanese territory earlier in the day.

“Among the targets that were attacked, terrorist infrastructures, rocket warehouses, and compounds used by the organization,” the IDF wrote in a post on X.

On Friday, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah threatened to escalate his terror group’s involvement in the war — but said it was “already doing its part” by drawing Israeli forces north to the border with Lebanon.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant responded Saturday, warning Nasrallah not to “make a mistake.”

“We are not interested in getting into a war in the north, but we are ready for any task,” Gallant said. “If Nasrallah makes a mistake, he will seal the fate of Lebanon.”