Israel has launched its long-planned ground assault on Gaza City, and its troops have pressed deep into the densely populated city, which has been subjected to intense bombardment for weeks, triggering the forced displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
The launch on Tuesday came the same day as a United Nations inquiry found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – home to 2.1 million Palestinians, most of whom have been displaced multiple times during the 23 months of war, which has killed nearly 65,000 people.
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Israel’s decision to seize the city – home to more than a million people – has drawn global condemnation. Turkiye called the ground assault a new phase in its “genocide plans”. Ankara warned that it would trigger further mass displacement.
‘Wanton destruction’
An Israeli army official estimated that 40 percent of Gaza City’s residents, about 350,000, have fled south while many buildings have been destroyed, leaving families to dig through rubble with their bare hands to retrieve trapped relatives.
Footage verified by Al Jazeera showed huge explosions and columns of black smoke as Israeli warplanes struck the Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood. The blasts lit up streets already lined with ruins from earlier attacks.
Medical officials told Al Jazeera that at least 78 Palestinians have been killed since dawn, 68 of them in Gaza City alone. Emergency services reported that 20 people were killed in the bombing of the Daraj neighbourhood, where entire residential blocks were flattened.
The UN Human Rights Office in the occupied Palestinian territory has condemned the Israeli military’s “wanton destruction” of Gaza City as “tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.
Residents displaced
Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said Israel’s tactic is to “sandwich whoever remains in the city”. He noted that the eastern part of Gaza had already been cleared “not just of buildings or physical structures but also the densely populated area”. Residents who fled westward now find themselves displaced again.
As fighter jets hovered low in the sky, families and rescuers clawed through piles of concrete and twisted steel. “There was heavy bombardment here, and it was difficult to reach people,” rescuer Bashir Hajjaj told Al Jazeera.
“We took out many, many martyrs and wounded people. The situation was very difficult due to the shelling, the helicopters, the missiles, drones and the F-16 aircraft.”
Resident al-Abd Zaqqut described how a concrete block crushed his cousin during one of the strikes. “We don’t know if we should try to retrieve her or leave her,” he said. “We’re digging, breaking the concrete with our hands because there are no tools.”
Al-Mawasi, a coastal strip of land in southern Gaza has been designated by Israel as a “safe zone”, but Israel has repeatedly bombed it, and Palestinian government officials said it offers no safety.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza warned that the area lacks “basic necessities of life, including water, food [and] health services” and said disease outbreaks are spreading in its overcrowded encampments.
Displaced families, it said, face “direct targeting and killing both inside the camps and when attempting to leave them” while hundreds of thousands of people have risked returning north despite the bombardment, many of whom discover their homes have been destroyed.
Global condemnation
International criticism of Israel is growing, with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday calling the situation in Gaza “horrendous”, adding that the war in the Palestinian territory is morally, politically and legally intolerable.
Earlier, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called Israel’s escalation “a step in the completely wrong direction”. The UK’s new foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, warned the assault “will only bring more bloodshed”.
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the offensive “will make an already desperate situation even worse”.
“It will mean more death, more destruction & more displacement,” Kallas wrote on social media platform X. She added that the bloc will present measures on Wednesday to pressure the Israeli government to change course over the war in Gaza.
Western leaders, who reaffirmed their support for Israel’s “right to self-defence” in the wake of the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, have increasingly been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. Numerous rights organisations and genocide scholars have now dubbed the Israeli military offensive genocide. Last year, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over war crimes.
Inside Israel, opposition leader Yair Lapid denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the ground invasion, describing it as “amateurish and sloppy”.
Israeli rights organisations, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, Gisha, and Adalah, said “evacuation” orders for Gaza City amount to forced displacement.
“These threats are intended to displace an exhausted and starving population that has nowhere to flee,” the groups told Haaretz. They stressed the orders “do not stem from military necessity” and “are contrary to international law”.
