Israel intensifies offensive on Gaza and Netanyahu warns Hezbollah

The violence in the Gaza Strip continues to escalate and the forecasts are not very promising. On Monday, Israel continued bombing the strip to neutralise Hamas forces. At the same time, the Hebrew air force has carried out an offensive in southern Lebanon. A region that is home to the terrorist group Hezbollah, and to which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has referred: "If Hezbollah decides to go to war we will hit them with unimaginable force".
 
However, the option of the Islamist group entering the conflict head-on is by no means out of the question. Despite Netanyahu's warnings, Hezbollah has sporadically attacked northern Israel, where confrontation between the two countries is nothing new due to their historic differences. Now, the Prime Minister is threatening the Lebanese militia, claiming that going to war with Israel would be "the biggest mistake of his life".

On the humanitarian situation, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu himself agreed on Sunday to "a continued flow of assistance" to Gaza. The aid is expected to continue to arrive, as the first trucks began arriving on Saturday. The intention is that the Rafah crossing, which links Egypt's Sinai with the Gaza Strip, will serve to maintain the steady flow of aid, with the first shipments carrying food, medicine and water.

A further 14 trucks arrived in the region on Sunday evening, representing just a small part of all the aid that is expected to arrive in the coming weeks. However, there is still plenty of room for the volume of aid to increase. According to the humanitarian office, only four per cent of the volume of aid entering Gaza before the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians is currently arriving.

Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities continue to call on the Palestinian population to move south in the face of an imminent ground incursion by their forces to wipe out Hamas. The operation is expected to begin in the next few days, but has no specific timeframe, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant explained, "it could take months". He also assured that this move should be the last: "it will take a month, two or three, but in the end there will be no Hamas".
 
Israel wants to assert its right to self-defence in the face of warnings from much of the international community calling for proportionality. One of the leaders who has done so directly in conversation with Netanyahu is the President of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, who has supported the prime minister in his "right to defend himself from attacks by Hamas terrorists", but "within international and humanitarian law".

With the threat of a diplomatic crisis between Spain and Israel over minister Ione Belarra's accusations of genocide apparently behind him, Sánchez has sought to bring positions closer together by calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. The President of the government stated on his X profile (formerly Twitter) that one of the priorities is to "prevent the conflict from spreading to the rest of the region", as some experts suggest could happen.