In defiance of international condemnation, Israel has launched an expanded ground assault on Gaza City on Tuesday as Palestinians fled the enclave’s largest urban area in waves amid escalating bombardment.
The incursion began on the outskirts of the city 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.
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. 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.
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 UN’s children agency UNICEF also warned that “any further intensification” of military operations will “multiply children’s suffering exponentially, ripping away the last vestiges of protection.” In Gaza City, 450,000 children are facing famine and trauma, without aid and with “collapsed medical care,” the agency said in a post on X.
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.
View from Gaza as Palestinians evacuate the city
