Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that “intense” fighting against Hamas militants in the southern Gaza city of Rafah is nearly over, more than eight months into the devastating war.

“The intense phase of the fighting against Hamas is about to end,” Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel 14 network, without providing a clear timeline.

“It doesn’t mean that the war is about to end, but the war in its intense phase is about to end in Rafah.”

Israeli officials have described Rafah as the last Hamas stronghold in the Gaza Strip, and in early May troops entered the southern city, on the besieged territory’s border with Egypt, despite global alarm over the fate of Palestinian civilians sheltering there.

The military seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing, a key conduit for desperately needed aid into Gaza that has remained shut since then.

Netanyahu’s interview — his first with Israeli media since the war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack — was broadcast as his defence minister arrived in Washington for talks on the Gaza war and surging cross-border tensions with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.

On the ground in Gaza City, in the north of the Palestinian territory, Israeli bombardment continued on Sunday with medics and the civil defence agency in the Hamas-ruled territory reporting deadly strikes.

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement has traded daily cross-border fire with Israel’s army, heightening fears of all-out war particularly over the past two weeks.

Netanyahu said that “after the end of the intense phase” in the Gaza Strip, Israel would “redeploy some forces to the north… primarily for defensive purposes”.

– ‘Civilian administration’ –

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s visit to Washington, which he said would include meetings that are “critical to this war”, follows public statements by Netanyahu concerning US military aid which have added strains to ties with the White House.

Netanyahu has accused Israel’s close ally and biggest military supplier of freezing some arms and ammunition deliveries during the war, which US officials have strongly rejected.

As he prepared to depart for Washington, Gallant said: “Our ties with the United States are more important than ever”.

Netanyahu, who has faced growing pressure from Israeli demonstrators demanding a deal to free hostages still held in Gaza, said he would not agree to any deal that includes a permanent ceasefire — one of Hamas’s key demands in stalled mediation efforts for a truce.

“The goal is to return the kidnapped and uproot the Hamas regime in Gaza,” he said.

When asked about post-war scenarios for Gaza, Netanyahu said it was “clear” that Israel would maintain “military control in the foreseeable future”.

“We also want to create a civilian administration, if possible with local Palestinians” and regional backing “to manage humanitarian supply and later on civilian affairs in the Strip”, Netanyahu added.

Similar proposals Netanyahu had presented to his ministers in February were swiftly rejected by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and prompted US warnings against the “Israeli reoccupation of Gaza”.

Two members of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, former military chiefs Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, left the government earlier this month over the lack of post-war plans.

– War ‘must stop’ –

In Gaza, Israeli forces kept striking targets and battling Hamas.

In Gaza City, medics at Al-Ahli hospital told AFP that at least five people were killed in an Israeli air strike on a facility of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

The Israeli military said its jets struck militants who “operated from within buildings that previously served as an UNRWA headquarters”

There was no immediate comment from UNRWA, whose facilities have come under attack before.

Some UNRWA buildings have been turned into shelters for displaced Palestinians during the war.

An early morning air raid on a family home elsewhere in Gaza City killed at least seven people, the civil defence agency said.

The October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

The militants also seized hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza although the army says 41 are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,598 people, also mostly civilians, Gaza’s health ministry said.

“This war must stop,” said Umm Siraj al-Balawi, struggling to survive in a makeshift shelter amid a field of rubble, with strung-up sheets protecting her young children from the blazing sun.

But despite the needs, “delivery of any meaningful humanitarian assistance inside Gaza has become almost impossible and the very fabric of civil society is unravelling,” the European Union said in a statement.

As the war has raged on, Israeli protesters have taken to the streets week after week demanding greater efforts to bring home the remaining hostages.

In his Sunday interview, Netanyahu said that if his rule ends, “a left-wing government will… establish a Palestinian state”, dubbing it a threat to “our existence”.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah said it had targeted military positions in northern Israel with attack drones, after an Israeli strike in eastern Lebanon killed the commander of another armed group, Jamaa Islamiya.

After the Israeli military said plans for a Lebanon offensive had been approved, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah responded that no part of Israel would be spared in the event of a full-scale war.

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Jewish people marked April 22 the start of Passover, a celebration of freedom, and around many holiday tables in Israel chairs stood empty for hostages still held captive in Gaza.

The week-long Jewish festival, also known in Hebrew as the “holiday of freedom”, celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery, as told in the Bible.

Passover is traditionally observed with a seder: a holiday feast when families eat symbolic foods and read the Haggadah.

The more than millennium-old text recounts the Exodus and Jewish people’s ties to, and their yearning to return to, the Holy Land.

For many this year, Passover will be stained by absence and anguish; particularly the relatives of the hostages, grieving families and more than 120,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in the north and south of the country because of the war in the Gaza Strip.

“All of the symbolic things we do at the seder will take on a much more profound and deep meaning this year,” said Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh is one of the hostages.

“The bread of affliction, the bitter herbs, the saltwater that represents the tears of the Jewish people when they were in captivity, in slavery.”

For days, Israeli Jews have been making preparations for the holiday: fastidious house cleaning, burning leavened goods eschewed during Passover, and copious food shopping.

How can we celebrate?

But the holiday mood has been dampened by more than six months of war in Gaza, with many Israelis serving in the military away from home.

Above all, the continuing captivity of 129 hostages abducted by Palestinian militants on October 7 has cast a pall over Passover.

On that day, Gaza-based militants launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,170 people, Israelis and foreigners, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Militants also abducted some 250 people during the attack.

Israel’s retaliatory invasion of the Gaza Strip has killed 34,151 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

Neither military force nor indirect negotiations with Hamas have yet succeeded in bringing the remaining hostages home.

“Everything is deadlocked and nobody knows how to move forward, on our side and on the Hamas side,” said Gershon Baskin, an Israeli activist who has mediated between Israel and Hamas for more than a decade to free hostages in Gaza.

“We’re held hostage by our government and held hostage by Hamas,” he said. “There is no freedom this year.”

For many relatives of the captives, this Passover will not be joyous.

“How can we celebrate such a holiday while… people are still without their freedom, still waiting to be liberated?” asked Mai Albini. His grandfather Chaim Peri was taken hostage on October 7.

Hundreds took their discontent to the street, burning a symbolic seder table in protest outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house in the evening of April 22.

“He doesn’t want the hostages back because he doesn’t want the war to end or he’ll go to prison,” said protester Guy Ben Dror in the coastal town of Caesarea.

Making this Israeli-Palestinian war the last

Haggadahs sold out

Tzohar, a rabbinic group, the Hostage and Missing Family Forum and President Isaac Herzog have all urged families to leave an empty chair at their seder table, with the picture of a hostage on it.

“There is great hardship” this Passover, said Tzohar’s head rabbi, David Stav.

“Even at the most traditional seder night, the practice is that we also mention that which is missing and difficult.”

The Hostage and Missing Family Forum published a special edition of the Haggadah that “integrates new hopes, and introduces inspiring messages of contemporary spirit”.

It contains contributions from hostages’ relatives, a former chief rabbi of Israel, and Rita, a prominent Iranian-Israeli singer.

It has sold more than 2,50,000 copies in Israel and abroad, said Itay Shenberger, who heads the Haggadah project.

“It’s basically all the stock we had,” he said. The proceeds go to the forum’s efforts to secure the hostages’ release.

Wander in the desert

Many families will mark Passover away from home, driven out by fighting between Israel and militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah that has turned northern and southern border communities into ghost towns.

Around 60,000 Israelis from the north and almost an equal number from southern Israel remain internally displaced, according to official figures.

Hotels still house more than 26,000 displaced, many of whom will hold seders there.

Kibbutz Beeri, one of the hardest hit communities in the October 7 attack, will hold a communal seder in the Tel Aviv plaza that has become the epicentre of the hostage protests.

Nisan Zeevi, an entrepreneur from Kfar Giladi kibbutz near the Lebanese border, said his family has been “uprooted from our homes” for more than half a year.

Political leaders have given them no hint as to when they might return, he said.

“We’re not celebrating Passover in a normal way,” Mr. Zeevi said. Like the biblical Israelites, he added, this year they will “wander in the desert”.

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