TEHRAN- The Israeli occupation regime appears determined to invade Rafah, despite warnings from the United Nations and international aid agencies about the catastrophic results of a ground offensive.

Concerns among humanitarian organizations have emerged over a plan presented by U.S. President Joe Biden on March 7 to build an American pier off the Gaza shore to allegedly tackle the famine unfolding across the enclave.

Aid agencies have warned that the move was designed to disguise Washington’s real intentions.

It has now been revealed that the U.S. dock intended to be built in northern Gaza where starvation among Palestinians is at its worst level, will be set up in the central Gaza Strip instead. 

Aid officials say the construction of the U.S. pier in central Gaza will be very close to an Israeli-controlled militarized corridor that separates the north from the rest of the coastal enclave. 

This would place the Israeli military in charge of any humanitarian supplies via the U.S. pier, if any supplies actually reach Gaza. Tel Aviv has been widely condemned for preventing the entry of adequate aid, despite a famine. 

For months now, many in the U.S. and the UK have been accused of promoting aid supplies into Gaza to appease public anger (despite the rhetoric having no tangible effects on the ground) in a bid to shift media attention away from what would be a devastating Israeli invasion of Rafah. 

“One of the key arguments for having [the U.S.] dock was to put it further north so that suppliers could come in more directly to the north,” a UN official has been cited by mainstream media as saying. The same UN official added that what was actually being proposed looked more like a “smokescreen to enable the Israelis to invade Rafah”.

An estimated 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza have been forcibly cornered into Rafah, the southernmost city of the Strip and the last Palestinian region that has not been invaded by land.

On Tuesday, the UN rights chief reiterated his warning against an Israeli ground assault in the city. 

“The world’s leaders stand united on the imperative of protecting the civilian population trapped in Rafah,” Volker Turk said in a statement.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also condemned Israeli strikes against Rafah in recent days that mainly killed women and children. 

The UN High Commissioner’s office has also decried “the latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses (struck by Israeli missiles in Rafah) where 15 children and five women were killed,” underlining that “this is beyond warfare”.

Whilst Israeli airstrikes continue to hit Rafah like the rest of the enclave, experts say a ground invasion would result in unspeakable levels of civilian deaths and destruction. 

For months now, many have described the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza as a war of vengeance. 

Hamas remains intact, firing rockets in northern Gaza. It killed another Israeli soldier on Tuesday while leaving others injured despite 200 days since Tel Aviv began its indiscriminate pounding of the northern part of the enclave with the stated goal of eliminating Hamas. 

In an op-ed published by the Israeli news site Maariv, an Israeli reserve general Itzhak Brik said, “Israel should declare the end of the war because it truly lost.”

He said those who are really endangering the security of Israel and Israelis are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition.

Speaking about the Israeli plans to invade Rafah, Brik said that Tel Aviv cannot fully defeat Hamas and other arms Palestinian factions (resistance movements). 

He stressed that a military offensive in Rafah would not make the chances of defeating Hamas and other armed Palestinian factions any better. Rather, the reserve general insisted, Israel had already been defeated. “We really lost in case you haven’t understood that yet.”

Slamming Netanyahu, the reserve general said the Israeli premier is more interested in his government than the war, and that he “feeds off the pressure from [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [Police Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir.” The Israeli general further described Netanyahu as a man who goes with the flow of the catastrophe. 

Experts believe an invasion of Rafah would bring the same results as all the other Israeli ground offensives such as in the northern Gaza City or the Southern city of Khan Younis. 

It would essentially bring tragedy to Palestinian civilians, with women and children bearing the brunt of the military attacks, while the armed wings of the Palestinian resistance have been affected very little.