Tanks piled up on the border; A bloodshed begins?

Earlier, US President Joe Biden threatened to withhold weapons from Israel if it launched a major ground offensive against the city in the southern Gaza Strip.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced that their fighters attacked Israeli forces in the eastern suburbs of Rafah with anti-tank grenades and mortars.

Residents of the eastern part of the city, which is the only major urban area in the Gaza Strip not yet entered by Israeli ground forces, said they could hear explosions from fighting between Palestinian fighters and approaching Israeli units.

CIA director William Barnes returned to Cairo from Jerusalem and continued meetings with mediators to see if they could agree on a ceasefire, two Egyptian security sources said, and yesterday he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Biden has put strong pressure on Israel to refrain from a general assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have taken refuge from other parts of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli tanks seized the Rafah border crossing from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, cutting off a key humanitarian aid route and forcing 80,000 people to flee the city, the UN said.

"I've made it clear that I will not send weapons if they attack Rafa," Biden said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

However, Israel has been aiming at its targets in Rafah for a long time, and the videos from social networks are disturbing, as they show children killed.

The UN also warned that cutting off the flow of humanitarian aid to Rafah would lead to the inevitable death of children who have been malnourished for months.

• Dire warning: Children in Rafah are on the "edge of survival"