Israeli strike kills health official, Gaza officials say, as Gallant visits U.S.
An Israeli strike killed a top official in charge of ambulance services in the Gaza Strip, local health officials said Monday, as the Israeli defense minister met with top U.S. officials in Washington about a possible new phase in the Israeli offensive.
The official, Hani al-Jafarawi, who was the director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza, was killed in a strike on a health clinic in Gaza City, the Gaza Health Ministry said.
The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment. It said earlier Monday that it had killed another man, Muhammad Salah, whom it called a Hamas operative, in Gaza City on Sunday night. It was not clear if the two men were killed in the same strike.
Hundreds of health care workers in Gaza have been killed by Israel’s pulverizing bombing campaign or have been caught in the middle of ground combat between the Israeli military and Hamas, according to the Health Ministry.
The meetings in the Washington, D.C., area by Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant with CIA Director William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday coincided with a potential shift in the military campaign signaled by Israeli officials in recent days.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the intensive phase of Israel’s war against Hamas was “about to end,” although he made clear that Israel would not stop fighting in Gaza until Hamas was “eliminated.”
The chief of staff of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, also said Sunday that Hamas’ fighters in Rafah, the southern Gaza city that Israel invaded in May, after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, were close to being crushed.
“We are clearly approaching the point where we can say we have dismantled the Rafah brigade,” Halevi said, adding the brigade was “defeated not in the sense that there are no more terrorists, but in the sense that it can no longer function as a fighting unit.”
In D.C., Gallant planned to discuss “the transition to ‘Phase C’ in Gaza,” his office said. Early in the war, Gallant outlined a three-phase battle plan that included intense airstrikes against Hamas targets and infrastructure; a period of ground operations aimed at “eliminating pockets of resistance”; and a third phase that would create “a new security reality for the citizens of Israel.”
On Monday, Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesperson, said Blinken planned to tell Gallant that the U.S. remained committed to Israel’s security.
But he said Blinken would emphasize “the importance of Israel developing robust, realistic plans for the day after the conflict, plans that include a path towards governance, towards security, towards reconstruction.”
Miller said a plan to govern Gaza was in Israel’s own security interests.
“We don’t want to see in Rafah what we’ve seen in Gaza City, and what we’ve seen in Khan Younis, which is the end of major combat operations and then the beginning of Hamas reasserting control and reasserting activity in those areas,” Miller said, naming cities in Gaza that the Israeli military had invaded.
Netanyahu has ruled out a proposal, pushed by the Biden administration, to hand over Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, which partly governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Netanyahu has said that Israel must oversee “overall security” in Gaza even after the fighting is over.
On Monday, Netanyahu declared his support for a cease-fire proposal endorsed by the United States and the U.N. Security Council, although he has been sending mixed signals about it. The proposal would secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza seized during the Oct. 7 attacks.
“We are committed to the Israeli proposal, which President Biden has welcomed. Our position has not changed,” Netanyahu said in an address to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. At the same time, he repeated his long-standing position that Israel would not stop the war until Hamas was eliminated.
Netanyahu’s comments came a day after he suggested that he was willing to strike a “partial” deal for the return of some of the hostages before resuming the war. Those comments prompted criticism in Israel, including from relatives of the captives who have been pushing for a deal to secure their return.
The remarks by Netanyahu signaling a less intensive phase of the Israeli offensive in Gaza could point to a shift in Israel’s focus to its escalating conflict with Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon, who have been exchanging strikes with Israeli forces for months. The increased fighting has led to international concerns about a wider war between the Israeli military and Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.
Gen. CQ Brown, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Sunday that an Israeli military offensive against Hezbollah would risk an Iranian response, according to The Associated Press.
Miller said that Blinken also planned to discuss with Gallant “the need to avoid further escalation of the conflict.”
U.S. officials briefed on the planned discussions with Gallant said they would focus primarily on the stalled cease-fire negotiations, next steps for governing and security in Gaza if a cease-fire deal were reached, and Israel’s plans for its northern border.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.