Israel’s military orders Gaza City residents to evacuate
Israel’s military has ordered Gaza City residents to evacuate ahead of an expanded offensive to seize the territory’s largest urban centre, part of a planned takeover stirring international alarm.
Taking over the city of 1 million Palestinians complicates ceasefire efforts to end the nearly two-year war. On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu warned residents of Gaza City to leave immediately, hours after Israel said it would ramp up airstrikes. The Israeli prime minister said forces were now organising and assembling into Gaza City for a ground “manoeuvre”.
International critics say Israel’s plan – which includes demilitarising the whole strip as Israel takes security control of it – could deepen the humanitarian plight of the 2.2 million people living there, who are also facing a growing famine.
Key events
Israel’s expanded assault on Gaza City will endanger the lives of ‘countless civilians’, charity warns
ActionAid has said it is “gravely alarmed by the planned reoccupation of Gaza City” which the charity says will endanger the lives of “countless civilians” and heap further devastation on communities already suffering from famine conditions caused by Israel’s aid restrictions.
More than half of ActionAid’s local partners are based in Gaza City – the Strip’s largest urban area – and the charity says in a press release that they “remain determined to continue their lifesaving work for as long as conditions allow”.
One such partner organisation is the Palestinian Development Women Studies Association (PDWSA), which helps with emergency response efforts and offers mental health support for women and girls who have survived violence.
PDWSA staff member Mohammad Al Madhon said:
Where I live in Gaza City, it is subjected to systematic destruction carried out by the occupying army as part of the ongoing war of extermination.
The occupation is using remotely detonated “robots,” in addition to heavy gunfire from quadcopter drones targeting anyone who moves, along with random artillery shelling that strikes our homes and the surrounding area around the clock.
We tried to endure and remain in our homes, but as bombardment intensified, water was cut off, and food became nearly impossible to find, we were forced to search for another place to flee.
We have been looking for a place in the central or southern parts of the Strip, but the immense population density there and the absence of empty spaces prevented that.
On top of this, the insane rise in the prices of land and houses available for rent left us with no choice. Therefore, alongside many other families, we decided to stay in Gaza City with no safe alternative.
ActionAid, which is calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and for Israel to allow a surge in humanitarian aid, says the expanded assault on Gaza City poses particular dangers to pregnant women who often have to walk long distances with no food and whose babies development is severely affected if they are malnourished.
Gaza’s health ministry said in a post on Telegram that over the past day it recorded six new deaths caused by “famine and malnutrition”.
This brings the total number of Palestinian people who have died from famine and malnutrition to 399, including 140 children.
In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognised organisation that classifies the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition, said that an “entirely man-made” famine was taking place in Gaza’s largest city, Gaza City, and its surrounding area.
In May, Israel eased a two-month total blockade on aid entering Gaza but supplies remain totally inadequate for the population’s basic needs. Israel has been accused of continuing to obstruct life-saving aid from entering the territory.
Israel to demolish homes in Palestinian villages of Jerusalem attackers
Israel has ordered the demolition of homes in the West Bank home towns of two Palestinian gunmen who carried out a deadly attack a bus stop in Jerusalem yesterday morning.
The gunmen, from the towns of Qatanna and Qubeiba north of Jerusalem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, opened fire at a bus stop on the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday, killing six people.
Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had ordered sanctions to be imposed on the attackers’ family members and residents of the two villages.
Every structure that had been built without permits in the two towns would be demolished, and 750 people would have their permission revoked to work in Israel, the main source of income for many Palestinian families.
Israel claims that demolishing the homes of relatives of attackers and their fellow villagers is a deterrent to future attacks. But it is widely seen as a form of collective punishment, prohibited by international law.
Dan Sabbagh
Dan Sabbagh is the Guardian’s defence and security editor
Fifty-one Israeli arms makers and the US defence giant behind the F-35 fighters used to bomb Gaza are among the 1,600 exhibitors at the biennial DSEI trade show that begins in London’s Docklands on Tuesday.
Their presence will be the focus for hundreds planning to demonstrate outside the four-day arms fair, at which the defence secretary, John Healey, is expected to speak alongside senior British military officials.
Campaign Against Arms Trade (Caat) said Israel’s three biggest arms companies – Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) – were among those planning to attend despite the UK barring an Israeli government delegation last month.
Emily Apple, Caat’s media coordinator, said the British government had reached “peak complicity in genocide” in allowing Israeli arms makers to exhibit, a decision that she said allowed “companies to market their genocide-tested weapons” to international buyers.
You can read the full story here:
At least 11 people have been killed in Israeli air attacks across Gaza since dawn, Al Jazeera is reporting. We have no been able to independently verify this information yet.
Here are some recent images sent to us over the newswires from Gaza:
Sam Jones
Sam Jones is Madrid correspondent for the Guardian
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has stepped up his scathing criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, accusing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of “exterminating a defenceless people” by bombing hospitals and “killing innocent boys and girls with hunger”.
Speaking on Monday morning to announce a raft of measures designed to increase the pressure on Netanyahu to stop the military campaign, Sánchez said that while the Spanish government would always support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, it felt compelled to try to “stop a massacre”.
“Protecting your country and your society is one thing, but bombing hospitals and killing innocent boys and girls with hunger is another thing entirely,” he said.
“What Prime Minister Netanyahu presented in October 2023 as a military operation in response to the horrific terrorist attacks has ended up becoming a new wave of illegal occupations and an unjustifiable attack against the Palestinian civilian population – an attack that the UN special rapporteur and the majority of experts already describe as a genocide.”
The Spanish prime minister pointed to the numbers of dead, injured, displaced and malnourished. “That isn’t defending yourself; that’s not even attacking,” he said. “It’s exterminating a defenceless people. It’s breaking all the rules of humanitarian law.”
Sánchez also hit out once again at the international community, saying major world powers had ended up “paralysed between indifference over a conflict without end and complicity with the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu”.
You can read the full story here:
Israeli airstrikes and demolitions have destroyed dozens of buildings in areas of Gaza City, with intense bombardments having levelled several neighbourhoods in recent weeks.
Israel has bombed Gaza City residential high-rises in recent days ahead of a long-threatened ground offensive.
Gaza City residents are being told to move to the southern part of the territory to areas that are under frequent Israeli bombardment and are already overcrowded.
The UN, for example, has said the tent camps in al-Mawasi, an area between southern Gaza’s Khan Younis and the coastline, are overcrowded and unsafe, with southern hospitals overwhelmed and undersupplied.
As my colleague William Christou notes in this story, tens of thousands of people have already left the city as Israel has stepped up its bombardment, and the roads leading south have been packed with residents carrying their belongings in carts and trucks.
Gaza City is being gripped by famine caused by Israel’s restrictions on aid and the expanded assault will only deepen the widespread suffering of the civilian population there and could forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people, many of whom are ill or frail.
The Israeli military warned on social media on Tuesday that it would act with “greater force” in Gaza City and told residents to leave.
“To all residents of Gaza City … the defence forces are determined to defeat Hamas and will act with greater force in the Gaza City area,” Colonel Avichay Adraee said in the post on X.
Evacuate immediately via the Al-Rashid axis.
Adraee, the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesperson, also said: “Your remaining in the city is extremely dangerous.”
The Israeli military’s order for a large-scale evacuation of Gaza City on Tuesday morning is the first warning for a full evacuation of Gaza’s capital in the current round of fighting.
Also on Tuesday, the AP reported, defence minister Israel Katz said Israel had demolished 30 high-rise buildings in Gaza, which it accused Hamas of using for military infrastructure.
As just reported, Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel planned to destroy at least 50 “towers of terror” that he said were used by Hamas.
Here’s footage of Benjamin Netanyahu warning residents of Gaza City on Monday to “leave now”, hours after Israel said it would escalate airstrikes on the territory.
It came as Gaza’s health ministry said hospitals had received the bodies of 65 people killed by Israeli fire over the past 24 hours, with another 320 people wounded.
The Israeli prime minister says in his address that over the past couple of days the Israeli air force has taken down 50 “terrors towers” and “this is only an introduction” to a “powerful main act, which is a ground manoeuvre of our forces which are now assembling and organising, into Gaza City”.
Netanyahu also said, addressing “the residents of Gaza”: “you have been warned: leave now”.
The footage is here:
Israel’s large-scale evacuation order for Gaza City residents comes as mediation efforts by the US, Qatar and Egypt have failed to bridge gaps between Israel and Hamas in order to secure a ceasefire and the release of remaining hostages Hamas holds in Gaza.
Israel had already taken control of 75% of Gaza since the war began with Hamas’ October 2023 assault on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken as hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israeli authorities say 20 of the remaining 48 hostages in Gaza are alive, as Reuters reports.
Israel’s subsequent military assault has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians, Gaza’s health ministry says, as well as internally displacing nearly the entire population and leaving much of the territory in ruins.
Israel’s military orders Gaza City residents to evacuate
Israel’s military has ordered Gaza City residents to evacuate ahead of an expanded offensive to seize the territory’s largest urban centre, part of a planned takeover stirring international alarm.
Taking over the city of 1 million Palestinians complicates ceasefire efforts to end the nearly two-year war. On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu warned residents of Gaza City to leave immediately, hours after Israel said it would ramp up airstrikes. The Israeli prime minister said forces were now organising and assembling into Gaza City for a ground “manoeuvre”.
International critics say Israel’s plan – which includes demilitarising the whole strip as Israel takes security control of it – could deepen the humanitarian plight of the 2.2 million people living there, who are also facing a growing famine.
