Israel said it launched an expanded ground assault on Gaza City on Tuesday in defiance of international condemnation, as Palestinians fled the enclave’s largest urban area in waves amid escalating bombardment.
The long-anticipated incursion began on the outskirts of the city, Israeli officials said, where Israel’s military has accelerated its airstrikes and the destruction of high-rise towers over the last week.
“Gaza is burning,” Defense Minister Israel Katz wrote on Tuesday. He said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was “striking terror infrastructures” and working to secure “the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is at a “critical stage” in the war as it attacks Gaza City, which his government sees as one of the last remaining strongholds of Hamas.
The incursion comes as the United Nations and others have warned that the assault will worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis, with parts of the Gaza officially declared under famine. Approximately one million people – nearly half of the territory’s population – live in and around Gaza City. Israel has tried to force the local population to evacuate, but the IDF has said that only about 40% of people have left so far, numbers which CNN cannot independently confirm.
Netanyahu’s decision to move forward with the operation, despite growing international censure and the concerns of his own security officials, underscores his willingness to defy global pressure to pursue the war on his terms.
On Tuesday, an independent UN inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, finding, in part, that civilians in the battered enclave “were targeted collectively due to their identity as Palestinians.”
Israel said it “categorically rejects the distorted and false report” as it called for the commission to be abolished.
A convoy of Israeli tanks is seen at Israel’s border with Gaza on September 16. – Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
Gaza City, which had largely avoided the fate of destroyed cities such as Rafah and Khan Younis over almost two years of war, now faces the same grim outlook. On Tuesday, at least 93 Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza alone, and more than 100 across the enclave, according to the health ministry and hospital authorities in Gaza.
Shaken by a night of heavy airstrikes, Gaza City residents carried what remains of their belongings as they tried to flee. CNN footage showed destroyed houses in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of the city, some entirely flattened, with people hauling bags and blankets through the rubble in search of shelter further south.
Israeli drones buzzed overhead as locals told CNN the overnight strikes were some of the most intense they’ve seen in months.
Maysar Al Adwan, from Gaza City, carried mattresses and blankets over his head, sweat pouring down his face. He said he couldn’t sleep all night.
“Fear, fear, it’s all fear,” he told CNN. “Explosions over our heads, all day.”
The assault on Gaza City was supposed to begin only after Israel had forced the Palestinian population to evacuate to the al-Mawasi area, according to the Israeli security cabinet’s plans for the operation approved in early August.
Israel was also supposed to expand the number of aid facilities run by the controversial US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to a total of 16 sites. But only about five are now open, often forcing Palestinians to walk for hours to seek desperately needed food and aid.
Rawan Al Salmoni, a mother of four, was sitting on the sidewalk near a destroyed building in Gaza City, holding her toddler. She said she was mentally exhausted due to repeated evacuations. She said she thought she would die in the latest bombardment, with strikes pounding the city one after another.
“We said by God, we will die here. It’s a miracle that we left,” she said.
Across central and northern Gaza, Palestinians packed what they could and fled in a desperate search for someplace safe. This was not the first displacement for many. Crowds packed the Al-Rashid Street coastal highway as they tried to move south along a road so busy that cars barely moved.
Standing on top of a pickup truck on Salah al-Din Road, Ahmad Abul-hal told CNN:
“Do you think we’re fleeing to go on a picnic? We’re fleeing the destruction and the ruins. But we’re going from death to death, it’s not like we’re going from death to glory. The situation is as bad as can be.”
The UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk called for the international community to prevent Israel from invading Gaza City. “It’s absolutely clear that this carnage must stop and it has to stop at once,” Türk told journalists on Tuesday. “It’s also important that the whole world screams for peace. What we see is a further escalation, which is totally and utterly unacceptable.”
The Palestinian Authority (PA) pleaded for a global intervention and appealed to the United States to step in. “The entire world has rejected this escalation, considering it a war crime against humanity and will lead to further tension and instability in the region,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the PA presidency, said in a statement.
Displaced Palestinians move southward with their belongings on a road in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip following renewed Israeli evacuation orders for Gaza City on September 16. – Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images
But Israel has the clear backing of the US under the Trump administration, underscored by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Jerusalem just as Israel announced it was beginning this new offensive. On Monday, Rubio demanded that Hamas release the 48 remaining hostages in Gaza and relinquish power, even as he acknowledged such an outcome isn’t likely.
“It may require ultimately a concise military operation to eliminate them,” Rubio told reporters at a news conference, standing alongside Netanyahu.
Hamas, meanwhile, called the Gaza City offensive an “unprecedented barbaric Zionist escalation” which “violated all international norms and laws.”
The Israeli military estimates there are up to 3,000 Hamas militants in Gaza City, a military official said Tuesday, but the tiny number underscores the nearly impossible task facing the IDF, comprising less than 1% of the local population.
“We are expecting to see in combat between 2,000 and 3,000 Hamas terrorists in Gaza City,” the official said. But there is no apparent mechanism to prevent those Hamas members from joining the throngs of Palestinians evacuating south.
The invasion of Gaza City may not be decisive and further operations may lie ahead. “Gaza City is the main stronghold of Hamas at the moment,” the official added. “I said main, not last.”
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