Middle East unrest: Israel pounds neighbourhoods as operation to take Gaza City underway

Israeli strikes pummelled Gaza City and its surroundings Thursday, local time, after officials announced the launch of a widely anticipated operation to seize and occupy the enclave’s largest metropolis, despite condemnation from the international community, Palestinian residents and many Israelis who turned out this week in record numbers to protest the assault.

Israeli warplanes and helicopters circled Gaza City, hitting buildings there throughout the day, while heavy artillery pounded the neighbourhoods of Shejaiya in the east and Sabra in the south, residents reported.

In a brief, pre-recorded statement outside the army’s Gaza Division headquarters, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was there to approve the military’s plans to take over the city. His office said Wednesday that he had ordered the military to speed up the timing of the operation, after his security cabinet green-lit the decision to occupy Gaza City at a meeting earlier this month.

“We have begun the preliminary actions, and already now IDF troops are holding the outskirts of Gaza City,” Israel Defence Forces spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin said late Wednesday. He added that Israeli forces were also operating in Jabalya, north of the city, and in the southern neighbourhood of Zeitoun.

The planned operation has drawn condemnation from the United Nations and countries around the world, which warned it would lead to the forced displacement of about a million Palestinians in the area and deepen the suffering of civilians throughout the territory.

In Israel, hundreds of thousands of people protested the plan on Sunday, arguing that it would endanger the 20 hostages still believed to be alive in Gaza and strain already exhausted reservists.

Members of a forum representing families of current and former Israeli hostages in Gaza called Wednesday, local time, for an urgent meeting with Defence Ministry officials to ask how the military would ensure that Hamas captors would not execute the hostages as Israeli troops close in - as they did in August 2024, when Hamas militants shot six Israeli captives in southern Gaza.

“Approving plans to invade Gaza while a deal is already on the table for Netanyahu to approve is nothing less than sabotage in the making - a knife to the heart of the families and the Israeli public,” the forum said in a statement.

In his address Thursday, Mr Netanyahu said he had instructed his negotiating team to begin immediate discussions with mediators “for the release of all our hostages and the end of the war, on conditions that are acceptable for Israel.”

It wasn’t clear if the statement marked a change in Israel’s position, conveyed by Israeli officials this week, that it was no longer willing to consider a phased ceasefire that would see the hostages released in stages.

For days, Israel has stalled on responding to a last-minute push by Egypt and Qatar to stave off the invasion. The two Arab mediators persuaded Hamas to sign on to a proposal Monday for an initial 60-day ceasefire that tracks almost exactly with a US-backed framework to which Israel had previously agreed.

Instead, Israel - which already controls 75 percent of the Gaza Strip, according to its own estimation - appeared to be moving full steam ahead toward the conquest of Gaza City. The IDF issued call-up orders Wednesday for some 60,000 reserve soldiers for early September, military officials said. Between 120,000 and 130,000 reservists overall are expected to take part in the new offensive.

The first stages will mostly involve five divisions of active-duty forces operating throughout Gaza, with a focus on Gaza City, an Israeli military official told reporters Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the military. The official said the operation has been “carefully planned” and will be carried out gradually and involve an “expansion of our ongoing humanitarian efforts.” The IDF was working to establish more aid distribution sites, beyond the four hubs run by the controversial US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in areas of southern Gaza under Israeli military control, the official said.

Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, during which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage. Since then, the Israeli military has levelled and occupied much of Gaza, killing more than 62,000 people there, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and has displaced nearly the entire population at least once. The ministry’s toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it includes figures that show the majority of the dead are women and children.

Intense Israeli strikes over the past 10 days in eastern and southern Gaza City - a prelude to the ground operation - have already driven thousands of people to flee, according to the UN and international organizations tracking population movements. The attacks “indicate that the systematic destruction of Gaza City is already underway,” the UN human rights office said in a statement Wednesday.

Ishaq Badawi, 56, was one of those forced to flee. He had been living in a tent near the rubble of his house in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood with his wife and their seven children. The shelling and airstrikes grew so intense there last week that he decided to rent a truck for about $US1,000, load it with blankets, clothes, his kids and his partially paralyzed wife, and drive southwest to Mawasi, an area along the coast that is already packed with displaced people.

“All we heard were explosions, ambulances and people screaming, trapped or wounded. The nights were really rough,” he said of his final days in Zeitoun. “We just couldn’t take it anymore.”

The IDF issued evacuation orders for the neighbourhood in early August. The ensuing assault there - which began August 11 and has involved ground troops, airstrikes and the use of explosive robots - has already destroyed hundreds of homes and civilian buildings, including schools, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

In Gaza City’s historic district, residents are torn over whether to stay or go. The Israeli military sent evacuation notices to people in the area by mobile phone on Thursday, said Wejdan al-Baraqani, 36, who lives with her mother there.

“No one walks in the streets. From time to time, drones and helicopters fire live rounds. We also hear heavy artillery pounding Shejaiya and Sabra,” she said, adding that she could hear military vehicles moving in the distance.

“Of course I’m afraid. But where could we go?” she added. “We already went south once and came back. Anyone who’s been displaced before doesn’t want to relive that misery.”

Ms Baraqani said she hopes the proximity of her house to Gaza’s only Catholic church will confer some protection. But the church has been attacked before, most recently in July.

For a civilian evacuation to be lawful under international humanitarian law, it has to be temporary, the occupying power has to ensure that the place to which civilians are relocating can provide for their basic needs, and it must be presented as an option in the context of lawful military operations in the area, according to Adil Haque, a professor of international law at Rutgers University.

None of those criteria appear to apply in this case, he said, citing reports that the operations are already “targeting residential buildings, tents, shelters and are killing a high proportion of women and children.”

“If the kinetic operations that the IDF is going to carry out are themselves indiscriminate or otherwise unlawful, then we’re not looking at a lawful evacuation anymore - we’re looking at forcible displacement,” which consists of “the unlawful use of force in order to compel civilians to leave an area,” Haque said.

Brig-Gen. Defrin, the IDF spokesman, said that the Gaza City operation would also require the evacuation of the area’s hospitals, including al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals, which are only partially functioning after more than 22 months of war.

Issam Abu Ajwa, a general surgery consultant at al-Ahli Hospital, said Thursday that his facility and al-Shifa combined had received 30 bodies in the preceding 24 hours of people shot while waiting for aid or killed in Israeli strikes.

“As doctors and medical staff, we will remain with the wounded until the very end,” he said. “If evacuation becomes necessary, we will not leave until every injured person has been taken out.”

The IDF said Thursday that it began “discussions” earlier in the week to warn health officials about the need to evacuate. At a news conference, the director of al-Shifa Hospital, Mohamed Abu Salmiya, said the Israeli military asked hospital officials to prepare a plan for possible evacuation. But, he said, “no official evacuation order has been issued for hospitals in Gaza City at this time.”

Hospitals in the south of Gaza, where people displaced from Gaza City are expected to go, are over capacity and “barely able to provide for the people already there,” Olga Cherevko, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, wrote in a text message.

The UN human rights office called the mass displacement of civilians from Gaza City a breach of international law and warned that Israel’s operation risks “triggering an unprecedented, life-threatening humanitarian crisis and permanently extinguishing the Palestinian presence in Gaza’s largest urban area.”

“It is vital to reach immediately a ceasefire in Gaza,” UNSecretary General António Guterres said Thursday.

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