Over the past two days, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have bombed 50 buildings in Gaza City, part of Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse the Strip’s largest city and its administrative centre.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about the IOF’s mass destruction and vowed to escalate it. “This is just the beginning,” he said on Monday of the ground operation to take over Gaza City. “To the residents of Gaza City I say, you have been warned, get out of there.”
Widely circulating footage of largely residential and administrative towers struck by Israeli bombs showed some of Gaza City’s best-known towers caving in under Israeli bombs, sending up churning columns of thick, grey smoke and dust and rising like volcanic plumes.
This is destruction in its most brutal form, abrupt and total, and a message to Gaza City’s population of one million people still residing there.
On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz posted a warning on X vowing to bring about a “powerful hurricane” to strike the skies of Gaza City and what he called its “terror towers” in reference to the buildings targeted by the IOF.
The following morning, Palestinians awoke to an IOF mass expulsion order of “all” of Gaza City’s residents, “from the Old City, the eastern Tuffah [district] and all across the west to the sea,” with their being instructed to head south to Al-Mawasi.
Israel said it had designated “humanitarian” zones in Khan Younis’ Al-Mawasi district in the southwest of the Gaza Strip. The area, however, continues to be bombed by the IOF in what rights groups describe as a death trap for both the existing refugee camps set up there for 600,000 people or the newly displaced Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes in the north.
Israel’s plan to take over Gaza City was approved by its security cabinet a month ago. The IOF began preparatory and early ground operations described by multiple outlets as the “first stages” of an offensive to seize parts of Gaza City, placing the start of the push at around 20-21 August.
In mid-August, Israel announced a large reservist call-up of about 60,000 reservists intended to support the operation. The IOF said equipment and urban-combat drills were being readied.
Earlier this month, Israeli military spokespeople said they held 40 per cent of Gaza City while ground operations and intensified strikes continued in the Zeitoun district.
The Gaza City municipal area is roughly 45 square km. It is the largest urban centre in the Strip and is historically host to major markets, hospitals, the main urban economy and dense residential neighbourhoods. Destruction there has outsized implications for the whole territory.
As the IOF troops and the bombardment of Gaza City advanced deeper into the area this week, residents have reported both fears of escalation and the rejection of Israel’s forced displacement efforts.
The vast majority of Gaza City’s population was previously forcibly displaced to the south for a year in 2024 under IOF bombing, mass arrests, mass executions, and the targeting of civilian infrastructure from homes to hospitals.
When the January 2025 ceasefire agreement went into force, most people returned to Gaza City, whether to their homes, or to live in tents in their neighbourhoods. After enduring the brutal conditions of displacement, the vast majority of Gaza City’s residents say they can no longer repeat the ordeal.
They also cite the exorbitant costs of transportation, setting up tents or even renting in the south in the light of the massive destruction the IOF has inflicted across Gaza. Between famine and recurring displacement, Palestinians in Gaza say they have nowhere to go and no resources to survive Israel’s ethnic cleansing.
Zeitoun, Sabra, Shuja’iyya, Jabaliya, Sheikh Radwan and parts of central Gaza City have become sites of heavy IOF shelling, air strikes, and urban fighting. Independent reporting and NGOs have documented the widespread destruction of civilian apartment blocks and markets and of schools being struck and hospitals losing their function.
Satellite imagery and NGO analyses show heavy, often total destruction in many built-up neighbourhoods.
According to Israeli reports, the plan to take over Gaza City came from Netanyahu himself and was approved despite broad international criticism and objections from some domestic security services.
Netanyahu publicly framed the move as necessary to dismantle Hamas and to recover hostages, while his critics, including some former Israeli security officials, warned of long term strategic, moral, legal and humanitarian costs.
Rights groups, UN officials, many governments and commentators have argued that the plan, combined with prior forced displacements, area denials, the mass destruction of housing and infrastructure, and Israeli policy documents and think-tank proposals, points towards an Israeli intent to depopulate Gaza City or create conditions for the permanent removal of large parts of the Palestinian population.
Rights groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and multiple NGOs have stated that the measures, including destruction and the blockade and denial of aid, amount to unlawful forcible displacement or may constitute crimes against humanity and meet legal thresholds of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that the IOF has been targeting tents in Al-Mawasi with sniper fire and random shooting from drones and nearby military vehicles, as well as airstrikes and artillery shelling, while at the same time claiming the area is a humanitarian zone and ordering over one million residents of Gaza City to evacuate there, “turning supposed refuges into mass slaughterhouses.”
According to the Euro-Med Monitor, Israel’s pursuit of this policy reveals its intent to leave Gaza’s population with only two options: a quick death through bombardment or a slow death through engineered mass starvation and the denial of basic necessities.
These actions amount to genocide under international law, as they reflect a systematic effort to impose living conditions calculated to bring about the total or partial destruction of the Palestinian people.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: