Israel ramps up strikes on high-rises in Gaza City

Residents, already in the grip of a famine, were ordered to flee amid the escalation.

- By WAFAA SHURAFA AND BASSEM MROUE

PALESTINIANS flee south from northern Gaza. "There is ... no safe place, no safety at all," one woman said.

The Israeli army issued evacuation orders and targeted high-rise buildings in famine-stricken Gaza City on Saturday, calling on Palestinians to move to the territory’s south as it escalates operations ahead of a new offensive to seize the city of nearly 1 million.

Aid groups warn that a large-scale evacuation would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza City, which the world’s leading hunger watchdog says is suffering from famine as a result of Israel’s restrictions on food into the territory.

Most families have already been displaced several times during the nearly two year long Israel-Hamas war and say they have nowhere left to go, as the Israeli military has repeatedly bombed tent encampments that it had designated as humanitarian zones.

“There is no safe tent, no safe house, no safe place, no safety at all,” said Nadia Marouf, who fled Israel's offensive in the north with her children and resettled in Gaza City — only to have her tent destroyed Saturday in an Israeli airstrike that wiped out a 15-story building and surrounding encampment.

“Where do I go? We went to the south, there is no space in the south. Where can we go?”

Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee urged Palestinians on Saturday to flee to the south of the Gaza Strip, saying on social media platform X that the army had declared the makeshift tent encampment of Muwasi and parts of the southern town of Khan Yunis to be a humanitarian zone.

It shared a map of Khan Yunis neighborhoods within the redrawn borders of the humanitarian zone, which covered the district home to Nasser Hospital. Israel hit the hospital on Aug. 25 in a strike that killed 22 people, including five journalists — among them Mariam Dagga, who worked for the Associated Press and other media outlets.