Hamas still hounds Israeli forces in Gaza

According to Reuters, Palestinian gunmen kept up attacks against Israeli forces on Sunday in the Gaza, weeks after they were overrun by troops and tanks, a sign that Hamas still maintains some control.

Nearly four months into the war, there was persistent fighting in Gaza City in the north of the densely populated enclave and in Khan Younis to the south.

At the weekly Israeli cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 17 of Hamas' 24 combat battalions had been dismantled. The rest, he said, were mostly in the southern Gaza Strip, including Rafah, on the enclave's Egyptian border. "We'll take care of them, too," he said, according to a statement from his office.

The prospect of a push into Rafah has piled pressure on the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have fled their homes elsewhere and are sheltering there.

An Israeli official told Reuters that the military would coordinate with Egypt, and seek ways of evacuating most of the displaced people northward, ahead of any Rafah ground sweep.

After conducting partial pullouts from Gaza City in the past few weeks that enabled some residents to return and pick through the rubble, Israeli forces have been mounting incursions. Netanyahu described these on Sunday as "mopping-up operations".