Israel urges full evacuation of Gaza City as high-rise buildings destroyed

The Israeli military has urged a full evacuation of Gaza City ahead of its planned military operation in the city.

The announcement was the first warning for a full evacuation of the city in the current round of fighting.

Defence minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday that Israel had demolished 30 high-rise buildings in Gaza, which it accused Hamas of using for military infrastructure.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel destroyed at least 50 “terror towers” that he said are used by Hamas.

It was unclear if the towers Mr Katz referred to are in addition to those announced by Mr Netanyahu, who called the demolition of the high-rises “only the introduction, only the beginning of the main intensive operation — the ground incursion of our forces”.

Over recent days, Israel has destroyed multiple high-rise buildings in Gaza City, warning that Hamas has installed surveillance infrastructure in them.

The demolitions are part of Israel ramping up its offensive to take control of what it portrays as Hamas’s last remaining stronghold, urging Palestinians to flee for a designated humanitarian zone in the territory’s south.

There are around one million Palestinians in the area of Gaza City, though prior to the latest warning just a small fraction had evacuated.

Military spokesperson Colonel Avichay Adraee warned last week that the evacuation of Gaza City was inevitable, saying families who move southward would receive humanitarian assistance.

But aid groups warned there was little infrastructure to support them.

As of September 7, a coalition of humanitarian groups tracking movement in northern Gaza recorded an estimated 97,000 displacements since the start of the military offensive on August 14. Of those, nearly 50,000 movements were recorded of people fleeing south. Others were people moving within northern Gaza.

The data from the coalition, called the Site Management Cluster, tracks movement from eyewitness accounts, social media posts and information from partners on the ground, because access to northern Gaza is restricted.

Dr Rami Mhanna, managing director of Shifa Hospital, said although the situation in Gaza City was tense, the facility still operates and receives patients.

“So far, things are as usual,” he told The Associated Press, two hours after the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Gaza City. “But the atmosphere is tense and there is great psychological pressure on the staff and patients.”

The United Nations humanitarian agency said many families cannot evacuate even if they want to, because displacement sites are overcrowded and because it can cost more than 1,000 dollars to move to southern Gaza, a prohibitive cost for many.

A UN initiative to bring temporary shelters into Gaza said that more than 86,000 tents and other supplies were still awaiting clearance to enter the territory as of last week.

Mirjana Spoljaric, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, warned last month that a mass evacuation of Gaza City was impossible in a “safe and dignified” way. Ms Spoljaric said no area in Gaza can absorb such a massive evacuation given the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and the extreme shortages of food, water, shelter and medical care.

The UN agency that oversees Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday that Israeli attacks on residential towers in Gaza City had displaced dozens of families, with many of them having been left “on the streets without shelter or basic necessities”.

COGAT, the Israeli defence body overseeing humanitarian aid to Gaza, said 1,500 humanitarian aid trucks primarily containing food entered Gaza last week, and there are plans to bring in 100,000 tents in the coming weeks, many of which are currently waiting in Jordan.

The tents needed to be adapted to swap metal poles, which COGAT said were repurposed into rockets used by militants, with plastic poles.

The war in Gaza was sparked when Hamas-led militants abducted 251 people on October 7 2023 and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Forty-eight hostages are still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed to be alive.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 64,522 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

It says around half of those killed were women and children. Large parts of major cities have been completely destroyed and around 90% of the population of some two million Palestinians have been displaced.