Israel’s military has intensified its attacks on Gaza City with air strikes on heavily populated areas, as it pushes ahead with the initial stage of an operation to seize the enclave’s main urban centre that could forcibly displace close to one million Palestinians.
Among the victims of the Israeli assault on Gaza City on Thursday were six people, including four children, killed in the southern Sabra neighbourhood, a source at the nearby al-Ahli Hospital told Al Jazeera.
Footage from the scene of one of the attacks east of Sheikh Radwan showed the bodies of the dead and badly wounded strewn across the street amid flames and wreckage from the attack.
The victims in Gaza City were among at least 40 Palestinians killed across the territory since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza told Al Jazeera, eight of whom were reportedly seeking aid.
Among the other victims were five Palestinians killed by an Israeli drone strike northwest of Khan Younis, and at least three killed by Israeli forces near an aid centre north of Rafah, sources told Al Jazeera. In the north of the enclave, four people were killed and 10 injured in Israeli shelling of Jabalia al-Balad, emergency sources told Al Jazeera, while in central Gaza, five people, including two children, were killed while waiting for aid near the so-called Netzarim axis, a source at Al-Awda Hospital said.
In Gaza City, where Israeli troops are posted on the outskirts, thousands of Palestinians continued to flee their homes in a bid to escape the escalating offensive, amid heavy shelling of densely populated neighbourhoods like Sabra and Tuffah.
“We are facing a bitter, bitter situation, to die at home or leave and die somewhere else; as long as this war continues, survival is uncertain,” Rabah Abu Elias, a 67-year-old father of seven, told the Reuters news agency.
“In the news, they speak about a possible truce. On the ground, we only hear explosions and see deaths. To leave Gaza City or not isn’t an easy decision to make.”
Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli military was repeating a strategy it had used previously in Gaza, “targeting densely populated neighbourhoods to depopulate them”.
Israeli troops had previously taken the same approach in the eastern Gaza City neighbourhoods of Tuffah and Shujayea, he said, and were now deploying the tactics in the Zeitoun and Sabra districts in the southeast of the city.
Nowhere is safe
Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum said that for those fleeing the Israeli offensive on Gaza City, there were no safe havens in the enclave, as places that had been supposedly deemed safe by the Israeli military had repeatedly been targeted.
“They feel they have been hunted without any safe place to go to,” he said.
Abu Azzoum was nearby when a makeshift camp housing displaced Palestinians in Deir el-Balah was struck in an Israeli bombardment on Thursday, close to the city’s al-Aqsa Hospital. Footage he captured at the site of the attack showed chaotic scenes, as huge plumes of smoke rose from the attacked area.
“It’s only 9am … and the Israeli military is already scaling up attacks in Gaza,” he said.
Israel’s military has said it will call up 60,000 reservists as it pursues the operation to seize Gaza City, despite widespread international condemnation, some domestic opposition, and warnings that the offensive will deepen the humanitarian catastrophe and forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of people to concentration zones in southern Gaza.
Close to one million Palestinians are believed to be in Gaza City, where Israeli tanks have been pushing closer to the city’s centre this week.
“The intensification of hostilities in Gaza means more killing, more displacement, more destruction and more panic,” Christian Cardon, chief spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Al Jazeera.
“Gaza is a closed space, from which nobody can escape … and where access to healthcare, food and safe water is dwindling,” he said. “This is intolerable.”
The head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said at a briefing in Geneva that child malnutrition in Gaza City had risen sixfold since March.
“We have a population that is extremely weak that will be confronted with a new major military operation,” he said. “Many will simply not have the strength to undergo a new displacement.”
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Thursday that there had been two more deaths in the territory due to malnutrition in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of victims of famine and malnutrition during the war to 271, including 112 children.
It said that a total of 70 people had been killed and 356 wounded by Israeli fire in the enclave in the same period, based on the numbers brought to hospitals in Gaza, while still more victims remained trapped beneath rubble.
‘Beginning of ethnic cleansing’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing ahead with the Gaza City offensive despite renewed efforts to reach a ceasefire, including the latest ceasefire proposal that Hamas has responded positively to.
The decision to push ahead with the operation shows the Israeli government has “no intention to put an end to the war”, Gideon Levy, columnist for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, told Al Jazeera.
“There is no other way to explain it,” he said. “There is a Hamas offer on the table and Israel hasn’t even discussed it yet.
“So, either they [Israel] want to put more pressure on Hamas, which I’m not sure is very probable, or they’re really serious about reconquering Gaza City, pushing all the people to the south and then offering them to leave the Gaza Strip.
“That’s the beginning of an ethnic cleansing of Gaza,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands said the operation had been “demanded” by Netanyahu despite military opposition.
“His generals didn’t really want it. They pushed back, saying it was a trap for the military, that the military was tired after nearly two years of fighting, and wasn’t ready for it. But Netanyahu wanted it.”
He said there was a risk for Israel that the army would fail “because the army is not ready for it, and the reservists won’t turn up or they’ll turn up late, and it just doesn’t have the capability to pursue this operation”.
Israeli public opinion was also swinging against the war, he said, noting, “We understand that a majority of Israelis now want the war to finish.”
