Palestinian families are choosing between braving Israel’s fierce bombardment at home or being forcibly displaced again.
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 media that two women were among those killed.
Videos verified by media 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 media, 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 media 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”.
Condemnation continues after Nasser Hospital attack
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.
Human Rights Lawyer Geoffrey Nice said Israel’s admission of error was “very interesting”.
“[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 media.
“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.”
Abd Raouf Shaat, a photo and video journalist working in Gaza, expressed his grief at the onslaught of Palestinian media workers and resolved to continue his work.
“Every day, we are saying farewell to a journalist,” he told media. “But we will continue their work and their message.”
Several of those wounded in the attack are receiving treatment for serious injuries.
Human rights groups have accused the Israeli military of committing war crimes in its indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza. Leaked Israeli intelligence has revealed that 83 percent of all those killed since Israel began its war on the enclave have been civilians, one of the highest civilian tolls in modern conflicts.
Several of the journalists killed in the bombing of Nasser Hospital worked for the international news agencies Reuters and The Associated Press. One of them, Mohammad Salama, worked for media.
Israel has now killed more than 270 journalists and media workers in Gaza since its war started in October 2023, according to an media tally.
In preliminary findings released on Tuesday, the Israeli military claimed an inquiry into the incident suggested the target had been a camera positioned in the area by Hamas to surveil Israeli troops.
“In light of this, the force acted to destroy the camera,” the army said. Israel routinely justifies its deadly attacks across the Gaza Strip by claiming it was targeting Hamas.
Hamas called the accusation “baseless” and said Israel lacked any evidence. It added that the claim was “merely aimed at evading legal and moral responsibility for a full-fledged massacre”.
Israel has attacked hospitals multiple times throughout nearly two years of its genocidal war on Gaza, asserting that Hamas embeds itself in and around the facilities, without providing any verifiable evidence.
