THE Israeli military is pushing deeper into Gaza City, destroying entire neighbourhoods and leaving Palestinian families with nowhere safe to go, as it seeks to seize the Strip’s largest urban centre, while an Israeli-induced famine grips the besieged enclave.
An attack on a popular market east of Gaza City on Tuesday killed at least five Palestinians and injured many others. Sources at al-Ahli Arab Hospital told Al Jazeera that two women were among those killed.
Videos verified by Al Jazeera showed Palestinians fleeing the as-Saftawi area, north of Gaza City, as Israel attempts to force close to 1 million residents southwards to concentration zones.
The footage captured long lines of men, women and children moving along dusty and ravaged streets, many carrying bags, blankets and mattresses. Some pushed carts piled with belongings while others held children by the hand as they moved westward on foot.
Israel has completely destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in the Zeitoun and Sabra neighbourhoods of Gaza City since it started its sustained assault on the city on August 6, according to estimates by the Palestinian Civil Defence.
Gaza City resident and writer Sara Awad said Palestinian families had to choose between braving Israel’s intense bombardment at home or being displaced yet again.
“All the time, I’m wondering why I must flee and live in a tent, while my [home] is here,” Awad said. Every day, she sees more Palestinian families packing up their belongings despite having nowhere to go.
“It doesn’t make sense to leave my home while they are treating us not as human beings,” she said. Yet, she said she believed Palestinians were “living in [their] final days in Gaza City”.
At least 64 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza since dawn, hospital sources told Al Jazeera, including 13 people who were killed seeking desperately needed aid.
Since the United States- and Israeli-backed GHF took over aid operations in late May, more than 2,100 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
The United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA) warned in its latest update of worsening starvation, mounting casualties and collapsing services across the Gaza Strip. Gaza’s Health Ministry said three more hunger-related deaths were recorded in the past 24 hours, raising the total number of people who starved to death since October 7, 2023, to 303, including 117 children.
Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, told Al Jazeera that Israel was seeking “to eliminate and annihilate the Palestinian people by conducting not only genocide, but also ethnic cleansing”.
He argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pushing to “remap” the Middle East and create “economic hegemony, political hegemony [and] intelligence hegemony over the whole Middle East”.
Legal experts have been calling for Israel to be investigated over its “double-tap” attack on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital on Monday, which killed at least 21 people, including five journalists.
So-called “double-tap” attacks entail striking a target and waiting for emergency responders and journalists to arrive on the scene before bombing it a second time.
Netanyahu said in a statement released in English only that Israel deeply regretted what he characterised as a “tragic mishap”, without explaining how Israel had hit the same hospital not once but twice in apparent error.
“[This] means they should now not only be investigated, but investigated with absolute ferocity, in order to produce all the documents that would explain what they’d intended to do and how things went wrong,” Nice told Al Jazeera.
“If they can’t justify a mistake in terms of [hitting a] proper target with an assessed level of collateral damage, then they’ve committed a war crime.”