FLASH
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More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced from Gaza City in the last month, according to UN figures, with tens of thousands more forced to flee their homes and makeshift shelters every day in the face of a new Israeli offensive.
Multiple attacks by Israeli artillery, tanks and warplanes hit Gaza City again on Thursday, as a UN official said "new waves of mass displacement" were underway, after some 60,000 people fled the new onslaught within 72 hours earlier this week.
Israeli military officials say the total number following Israeli orders to evacuate Gaza City is much higher.
A steady stream of traffic heavily laden with household goods, blankets, mattresses, gas cylinders and often entire families filled Gaza's narrow coastal road on Thursday, as a steady stream of Palestinians headed south towards Israeli-designated areas.
Transport prices have risen sharply, forcing some to walk, laden with personal belongings and small children. Israeli military officials said Gaza City was a “Hamas stronghold” and said up to 450,000 civilians had fled. An official told the Guardian that the estimate was based on multiple sources, including drone surveillance.
Israeli forces now control the eastern suburbs of Gaza City and in recent days have moved to the Sheikh Radwan and Tel al-Hawa areas, from where they will position themselves to advance on the central and western districts where most of the remaining population is sheltered.
Large parts of Gaza City, once a bustling commercial and cultural hub, have been reduced to uninhabitable rubble. Until a few weeks ago, it was home to more than a million people, many of whom had been displaced multiple times.
On Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, described Gaza as “a wealth of real estate,” according to local Jewish media reports. Speaking at a property development conference in Tel Aviv, Smotrich said that “the demolition, the first phase in the renovation of Gaza, has already been done. Now we just have to build.”
That same day, the Israeli military announced the opening of a second route from Gaza City, through the middle of the Gaza Strip, for two days in an attempt to encourage the exodus. Its Arabic-language spokesman, Colonel Avichay Adraee, said the corridor would remain open for only 48 hours.
The Israeli military has dropped leaflets urging residents to flee to a designated "humanitarian zone" in the south of the territory, but aid agencies say conditions there are dire, with insufficient food, medicine and space and inadequate shelter.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, has rejected advice from top generals and Israeli intelligence officials not to launch an offensive. Many Israeli observers and commentators accuse Netanyahu, who faces corruption charges and is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, of trying to avoid early elections that could force his right-wing coalition out of power, prolonging the war.
The Israeli government has also been accused of aiming to make Gaza City uninhabitable to pressure Palestinians to leave and for other countries to accept them. At least 79 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks or gunfire across Gaza in the past 24 hours, mostly in Gaza City, the territory's health ministry said on Thursday.
The war was sparked by a Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, in which the militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Of the 251 hostages taken, 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 whom the Israeli military says are dead. Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 65,000 people, mostly civilians, and wounded more than 160,000 others.
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