On Saturday, the Israeli broadcaster KAN reported that top military commanders are set to meet on Sunday to discuss the fine print of the plan to occupy Gaza City.
“The IDF is preparing to advance the manoeuvre in Gaza, in accordance with the instructions of the political echelon,” KAN reported.
Last week, Israel’s security cabinet, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, approved a plan to occupy Gaza City and ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of its residents to the south of the strip.
The Israeli plan triggered regional and international condemnation as well as calls for Tel Aviv to rescind the plan and end its war on the strip.
In defiance, on Wednesday, the Israeli military endorsed the framework for a new offensive against the city.
On Saturday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has become a "problem", adding she would try to put pressure on Israel over the Gaza war as her country currently holds the EU presidency.
"Netanyahu is now a problem in himself," Frederiksen said in an interview with the Jyllands-Posten daily, adding that the Israeli government was going "too far."
The centre-right leader slammed the "absolutely appalling and catastrophic" humanitarian situation in Gaza and the new settlement project in the occupied West Bank.
"We are one of the countries that wants to increase pressure on Israel, but we have not yet obtained the support of EU members," she said.
Also on Saturday, foreign ministers from 31 Arab and Islamic countries condemned in a joint statement Netanyahu’s recent remarks about pursuing a “Greater Israel,” warning that Israel’s expansionist policies pose a grave threat to regional security and international law.
Signatories included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Algeria, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Palestine, alongside the Secretaries-General of the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
On Sunday, residents of Gaza City and neighbouring refugee camps told AFP of non-stop airstrikes on residential areas.
Al Jazeera reported that Israeli forces had already forced thousands of people from the Zeitoun neighbourhood in southeast Gaza City to evacuate.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Israeli forces had destroyed about 400 homes in Zeitoun and used remote explosive robots to demolish residential blocks.
A spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence told Al Jazeera that “what is happening in the Zeitoun neighbourhood constitutes a genocide”.
He confirmed reports that Israeli forces were using robots to remotely detonate homes and said rescue crews were unable to reach the wounded.
He said about 50,000 people were estimated to be in the area, “the majority of whom are without food or water” and lacking “the basic necessities of life”.
The spokesperson added that residents had nowhere left to flee and no means of survival, describing the situation as “dire and catastrophic”.
He said Israeli forces were annihilating Gaza City and that Civil Defence had no capacity to protect civilians.
Israeli forces had killed at least 70 Palestinians across the strip on Saturday, including at least 13 people who had been waiting for aid, he added.
Medical staff at al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat said six people, among them four children, were killed when Israeli forces bombed a house in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
Further south, an Israeli drone struck a tent sheltering displaced people in Mawasi al-Qarara, north of Khan Younis, killing a man and his wife.
Since 7 October 2023, the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza has killed 61,827 Palestinians and injured 155,275 others, the majority women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry, with thousands more missing or presumed buried beneath rubble.
In tandem, the five-month-old Israeli blockade on Gaza has continued to take a deadly toll on the 2.3 million population in the strip.
Director-General of Gaza’s Health Ministry Munir Al-Bursh reports that eleven people, including a child, have starved to death in Gaza in the past 24 hours.
Al-Bursh said the latest victim to have died from hunger was two siblings, aged 16 and 25, who died on the same day.
The health ministry said the number of deaths from starvation and malnutrition has risen to 251, including 108 children.
He added that 40,000 infants were suffering from severe malnutrition amid critical food shortages caused by Israel’s war and restrictions on aid into Gaza.
The UN human rights office said on Friday that at least 1,760 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid in Gaza since late May, as Israeli forces continue to open fire on starving civilians at the US/Israeli so-called aid distribution centres.
The director of the al-Shifa medical complex said hospitals were critically overcrowded with wounded from ongoing Israeli bombing.
He reported a rise in amputations due to antibiotic-resistant infections and said more than 200 patients’ lives were at risk because of severe shortages of medicine and malnutrition.
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