Members of the Palestinian police conduct a field tour in Khan Yunis, which is witnessing fierce battles between the resistance and the occupation (Anatolia Agency)
The Axios news website quoted American and Israeli officials as saying, “The American administration asked Israel to stop targeting civilian police members of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the Gaza Strip who accompany aid trucks in the Strip.”
American officials said that President Joe Biden's administration is increasingly concerned about the possibility of Gaza becoming a new Mogadishu, after the security vacuum and desperation opened the door for armed gangs to attack and loot humanitarian aid trucks.
According to the sources, Israel rejected the American request, because one of its goals in the war is to ensure that Hamas no longer runs the Gaza Strip.
The Biden administration warned that a complete collapse of law and order would significantly worsen the humanitarian crisis in the Strip, the officials added.
Axios said that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin discussed with his Israeli counterpart last Thursday American concerns, and stressed the need to find a way to provide security for aid trucks entering the Strip.
Direct targeting
Last week, 9 Palestinian police officers were martyred as a result of an Israeli bombing while they were providing humanitarian aid in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip.
Members of the Palestinian police appeared remarkably in several areas of Gaza, despite the ongoing fierce battles between resistance factions and the Israeli occupation army in several areas in the south and north of the Strip.
The Associated Press had quoted Gazan citizens and a Hamas official as saying that the movement had begun deploying police forces and civil servants near government offices and hospitals in the north and south of the Strip, and had also begun disbursing their monthly salaries.
The American agency interpreted the reappearance of Hamas police in Gaza City as evidence of the movement's steadfastness, despite the air and ground raids launched by Israel against it during the past four months.
The military spokesman for the Israeli occupation army, Daniel Hagari, said a month before the withdrawal that they had completed the dismantling of the military structure of the Hamas movement in the northern and central Gaza Strip, and had killed thousands of militants, and that they were close to eliminating the movement’s fighters in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
Since the seventh of last October, Israel has been waging a devastating war on the Gaza Strip that has left tens of thousands of civilian victims, most of them children and women, in addition to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe and massive destruction of infrastructure, which led to Tel Aviv appearing before the International Court of Justice on charges of “ Genocide".
Source: Axios + Al Jazeera