‘City of fear’: Palestinians trapped as Israel intensifies Gaza City attack

The Israeli military’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza City is reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble, forcing residents to flee in panic, with nowhere safe in the enclave, which has been under unrelenting bombardment for 23 months.

Israel’s round-the-clock assault on what UNICEF has dubbed the “city of fear” included an attack on a tent in the neighbourhood of Tal al-Hawa on Thursday that wiped out an entire family of five people, including three children.

Video footage of the attack showed Palestinians outside damaged tents, clearing up scattered belongings, including a pair of blood-stained pink slippers that lay among the debris.

“My children and I were sleeping in the tent when we heard the sound of bombing. Shrapnel fell on us, and my four children started screaming,” Israa al-Basous told the AFP news agency.

Attacks were reported in Gaza City’s Zeitoun, Sabra, Tuffah, Nassr and Shujayea districts, as the military erased entire neighbourhoods in its bid to drive out approximately one million people from the enclave’s largest urban hub.

Heavy bombardment in the Tuffah neighbourhood killed at least eight people and injured dozens more, according to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson of the territory’s civil emergency service.

In Shujayea, an Israeli strike on a residential building killed at least two people, according to an ambulance source. And in Zeitoun, three bodies were pulled out dead from under the rubble of a destroyed home that belonged to the al-Ghaf family.

“They’re moving from one area to another that is less dangerous, but still within the range of Israeli military fire, the air strikes and bombardment,” said media’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City.

Mahmoud said many of the displaced were moving in the hope of finding safety for a few days, only to find themselves being displaced all over again.

Many had fled to the city’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, only to find tanks pushing into the area northwest of the city centre, destroying houses and causing fires in tent encampments.

Hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties. At Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, the floor of the morgue was strewn with bodies wrapped in white shrouds.

One woman stroked the head of her dead son as his body lay outside on a stretcher.

“Who are you leaving me to, son? Why? Why?” she wept.

Tess Ingram, UNICEF’s communication manager for the Middle East and North Africa, warned that almost one million people were trapped in the “city of fear, flight and funerals”.

In total, 44 were killed on Thursday in Gaza City.

75 killed across the enclave

As terrified residents scattered in the aim of finding shelter from the bombs, Israeli military spokesperson Brigadier General Effie Defrin said that troops now held 40 percent of the city.

The operation, he said, would “continue to expand and intensify” in the coming days.

media’s Sanad fact-checking agency analysed satellite images that showed the “heavy presence” of more than 52 Israeli army vehicles in the Zeitoun neighbourhood.

The images, dating from August 25 and September 1, demonstrate a clear pattern of forced displacement of residents from northern and central Gaza City towards the west – in particular, along al-Rashid Street and the beach.

Palestinians who have fled Gaza City over the past few months have found dire conditions further south, where the mass movement of people has further overcrowded tent camps and pushed prices of basic goods much higher.

Shorouk Abu Eid, a pregnant woman from Gaza City, who was displaced to Khan Younis four months ago, said the arrival of more people from the north has worsened their plight.

“There is no privacy, no peace of mind,” she told The Associated Press news agency.

In any case, fleeing Palestinians are likely to encounter death and destruction wherever they go.

On Thursday, Israel also bombed central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, killing seven people, including three children.

And in southern Rafah, Israeli forces fired at a group of people seeking aid near an aid distribution point, killing seven and injuring more.

Across the enclave, 75 people were killed by Israeli army ground and air attacks since dawn.

US blames France and others for Israeli abuses

As diplomatic efforts to find an end to the war in Gaza stuttered on, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to blame countries that plan to recognise a Palestinian state for Israel’s abuses in the occupied West Bank.

Israel’s annexation drive in the West Bank has been gaining steam in the shadow of its campaign of terror in Gaza. This week, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the annexation of most of the territory.

Asked about the annexation drive by a reporter, Rubio effectively blamed France and other countries that intend to announce their recognition of a Palestinian state at the next United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York this month.

“We told all these countries, we told them all. We said, if you guys do this recognition stuff – it’s all fake, it’s not even real – if you do it, you’re going to create big problems,” Rubio said on Thursday.

Also on Thursday, the US added three prominent Palestinian rights groups, Al-Haq, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights to its sanctions list. Rubio said the rights groups were targeted for having “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court [ICC] to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent”.

The ICC last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also laid into France, claiming that it told French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot there was “no room” for a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron as long as Paris persisted in “efforts that harm Israel’s interests”.

On Thursday, European Commission vice president, Teresa Ribera, called the war in Gaza a “genocide” and slammed the 27-nation bloc for failing to act to stop it. Top European Union officials have so far shied away from the term to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza that has killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.