Israeli attacks kill 40 across Gaza as military escalates Gaza City assault
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.
Israeli attacks kill 40 across Gaza as military escalates Gaza City assault
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.'
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.'
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The E1 plan was first drummed up in 1994 under then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, just a year after he inked the United States-backed Oslo Accords, which ostensibly aimed to bring about a Palestinian state before the new millennium In 2004, Israel began building a police station and constructing new roads in that area of Palestinian land. Since then, construction and further planning have been mostly frozen to appease Western leaders, who feared that building thousands of new housing units there would make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state across the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Yet since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, the US and Europe have allowed Israel to violate every previous 'red line' in the name of 'self-defence', said analysts and human rights monitors. 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Most of these communities migrated to Khan al-Ahmar – an area in the central West Bank between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement – after they were driven out of the Naqeb (Negev) desert by Israel in the 1950s. The expulsions were part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing, in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands by Zionist militias to make way for the state of Israel – an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or Catastrophe. Imad al-Jahalin, the leader of a shepherd community in Bir al-Maskub, one of many villages in the E1 zone, says his community has managed to protect itself from expulsion for years. Last year, the community hired an Israeli Jewish lawyer to file a lawsuit against settlers who occupied some of their homes. The rights group Amnesty has previously accused the Israeli court system of serving to 'rubber stamp' Israel's occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories. 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The E1 plan should be understood as the culmination of Israeli attempts to change the spatial reality of the West Bank, so that a Palestinian state will never come to fruition, said Mustafa from the ICG. She added that this is a strategy Israel has deployed since signing the Oslo Accords. Israel, for instance, has long uprooted entire Palestinian villages and dispersed communities, bulldozed bustling refugee camps and erected dozens of barricades to impede the movement of Palestinians. 'The fact Israel is able … to reshape the urban landscape of the West Bank and make [those changes] so irreversible is indicative that Israel has no intention of committing to a two-state solution,' she said. Alon Cohen, the head of the West Bank area for Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organisation advocating for an end to the occupation, added that there is no economic or housing rationale for implementing E1. He stressed that the logic behind E1 was to simply encroach and irreversibly fragment Palestinian territory. 'Israel always uses settlement planning as a weapon,' he told Al Jazeera. Both Mustafa and Cohen believe the implementation of E1 will make life for Palestinians in the West Bank even more unbearable, stressing that the ultimate plan is to push more Palestinians to consider leaving the West Bank. However, al-Jahalin said that's not an option for him and his community in Bir al-Maskub. 'Nobody here has any idea where they will end up in the future [if we are forcefully displaced],' he told Al Jazeera. '[Our] people for now … are not thinking of going anywhere.'
