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Feb. 9 (UPI) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday Israeli forces will go forward with a ground offensive in Rafah, but the IDF will help civilians evacuate. Netanyahu's office issued the announcement as the United States and international groups have opposed the Rafah offensive over concerns for the safety of displaced civilians.
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"It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas by leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah," Netanyahu's office said "On the contrary, it is clear that intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians evacuate the areas of combat."
It added that Netanyahu had "ordered the IDF and the security establishment to submit to the Cabinet a combined plan for evacuating the population and destroying the battalions."
Netanyahu had earlier said that the military had been instructed to prepare for a ground offensive on what he called "Hamas' last bastion."
This prompted National Security spokesman John Kirby to warn that such an operation without serious planning to safeguard civilians would be "a disaster."
"More than a million Palestinians are sheltering in and around Rafah. That's where they were told to go. There's a lot of displaced people there," told a press briefing in Washington.
"The Israeli military has a special obligation to make sure that they're factoring in protection for innocent civilian life, particularly, you know, the civilians that were pushed into southern Gaza by operations further north in Khan Younis and North Gaza.
"Absent any full consideration of protecting civilians at that scale in Gaza -- military operations right now would be a disaster for those people, and it's not something that we would support," said Kirby.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday evening, U.S. President Joe Biden added his voice to that of his officials saying "[Israel's] conduct of the response in the Gaza strip has been over the top," although he did not mention Rafah specifically.
In a Thursday statement UNICEF called urgently for the parties to refrain from military escalation in Rafah where it said more than 600,000 children and their families are gathered after being displaced from their homes by combat.
"An escalation of the fighting in Rafah, which is already straining under the extraordinary number of people who have been displaced from other parts of Gaza, will mark another devastating turn in a war that has reportedly killed over 27,000 people - most of them women and children," UNICEF said. "Thousands more could die in the violence or by lack of essential services, and further disruption of humanitarian assistance."
On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Tel Aviv where he had been meeting government officials regarding a cease-fire proposal, said any "military operation that Israel undertakes needs to put civilians first and foremost in mind and that's especially true in the case of Rafah".
The population of Rafah, on the southern border with Egypt, has been swelled five-fold to more than 1.4 million as people have fled further and further south to escape the fighting, the majority of them living in tents.
Western districts of the city were hit heavily by airstrikes and tank fire from Israeli forces on Thursday morning killing at least 13 people, according to Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry -- but no indications of an all-out offensive as yet.
