Today, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said that Canada opposes any Israeli military operation in the city of Rafah, where about one and a half million Palestinians have taken refuge.

''I feel deeply concerned about what is happening in Rafah,'' Joly said, as today's Israeli bombing of this city located in the southern Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border resulted in the death of about 100 people.

''The ongoing Israeli operation is devastating for the displaced Palestinians and for all those who have taken refuge there, including foreign nationals and Canadians,'' Joly told reporters in Ottawa, ''these are mothers and children, (...) they are human beings present.''.

According to the United Nations, about 1.4 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have fled the ongoing war for more than four months between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement and gathered in Rafah.

Joly renewed the call for a ''sustainable ceasefire'' between Israel and Hamas and for the ''release of Israeli hostages'' and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

The Canadian Foreign Minister is leaving for the US capital Washington where she will meet tomorrow with her US counterpart Antony Blinken.

She will also meet in Washington with her Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi to prepare for the visit of the Jordanian monarch King Abdullah II, currently in the US capital, to Ottawa on Wednesday.

Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his determination to continue ''military pressure until the complete victory over Hamas,'' which considers Rafah its ''last stronghold'' in order to liberate ''all our hostages.''

Faced with international criticism, Netanyahu affirmed yesterday that his country will provide a ''safe passage'' for the population to leave Rafah, but he did not specify where they would go.

''They will evacuate'' the Palestinians. ''Where to? To the moon?'' asked, angrily, European Union foreign affairs commissioner Josep Borrell in Brussels.

For its part, the United Nations said it will have nothing to do with the ''forced displacement of the population'' from Rafah. Its High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said that the possibility of an Israeli attack on Rafah is ''terrifying.''