Intense Israeli Assault in Gaza City Prompts Massive Displacement
Gaza City experienced one of the heaviest attacks by Israeli forces since the onset of the conflict on October 7, forcing thousands of Palestinians to flee an area already devastated by months of warfare.
The most recent attack, which targeted the Eastern area of Gaza City, happened at the same time while Israel’s extreme right-wing coalition partners threatened to continue undermining ceasefire talks that are being held in Qatar presently. These factions argue that now is not the time to stop the conflict because it would be an unpardonable blunder.
Even though, as Israelis have stated, they control most of Gaza City now for several months, enemy activity persists in sporadically testing the occupying forces’ resolve and thus forcing the Israel Defense Forces to rethink its tactics and location of troops on the ground.
By the way, earlier, the Israel Defense Forces delivered the civilians’ evacuation orders in the identified area before the recent offence. However, the Civil emergency service of the territory said that over 40 people were feared dead in Gaza City since the current offensives hindered rescue operations.
Gaza witnesses said that Israeli jets targeted a residential flat by an industrial area south of the Gaza Strip’s central city of Gaza City, causing two fatalities and five cases of injury. A house was blown up in the town of Rafah, and another house bombing south of Gaza City killed one person and wounded seven.
“Citizens reported that they had been forced to leave their homes in the regions located southwest of Baghdad and stay in the northwest on the streets without a roof over their heads all night,” a source said.
Sayeda Abdel-Baki, sheltering at her relatives’ home in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City, shared her harrowing experience. Among the findings that were shared, some of the patients reported the following: We were fleeing at night due to very intense attacks. This is the fifth time I have been displaced.
Palestinian health officials stated that medics at al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City had transferred patients to an Indonesian hospital farther in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, which was also overflowing and lacking supplies.
An Israeli military statement revealed that their forces were launched on the grounds of such intelligence data claiming the existence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist infrastructure, personnel and item stock, weapons, and detention centres, including in the UNRWA headquarters.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner general for UNRWA, has stated earlier that representatives of UNRWA are convinced in the occupied territory, both Hamas and Israel used its facilities in the course of the conflict.
Expectations that an imminent ceasefire emerged after Hamas agreed with the fundamental aspect of an American-proposed ceasefire. Nevertheless, the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich together with other members of the right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the wars should not be stopped because Hamas can strike again.
”Hamas is falling and pleading to stop, Smotrich said on X. This is the time to put the choke hold till we dismantle the enemy. To pause now and let him heal and fight us again is unreasonable. ”
There are voices from opposition parties, unlimited Israeli media and families of hostages in Gaza that blame Netanyahu for undermining chances for a cease-fire for the scope of winning the election. Netanyahu’s speech could be described as intercalary in the sense of disrupting truce attempts; a senior Hamas official claimed Netanyahu deliberately ratchets up the scale of combat and bombardment in Gaza. ‘Whenever negotiations start a round for a new round of aggression and terror becomes imminent, he derails all the negotiation process and ups the ante of aggression and civilian slaughtering,’ the Hamas official said to the AFP agency.
There has been a decline in the support of Netanyahu after the October 7 attack by Hamas that unveiled that there are severe concessions in security in Israel. Many political pundits reckon that he would lose the elections, thus messing up the polls, if they were done now.
A political analyst, Dahlia Scheindlin, commented on the influence of far-right parties within the coalition: “It is therefore understandable that the far-right parties have some say on Netanyahu’s actions; they are his allies and were elected into that position. It would, therefore, be absurd if the far-right did not, in one way or another, influence Netanyahu.”
On Sunday, the statement from Netanyahu’s office said any deal must enable Israel to resume the attack until it attains its war aims – something that was sharply responded to by the opposition leader Yair Lapid.
“We are at a crucial moment in the negotiations. The lives of the hostages depend on this. Why make such taunting announcements? How does this help the process?” Lapid questioned.
