Israeli forces continued their assault on Gaza City on Monday, where they killed at least 16 Palestinians in strikes on two homes and on a tent housing a displaced family, local health authorities said.
The Israeli army said it had completed plans to launch a full assault on the city. However, it may delay the attack until US secretary of state Marco Rubio ends his visit to the region and more residents leave the city.
Israel says the offensive to take control of Gaza City is part of a plan to defeat Hamas for good, and that it has warned civilians to head south to a designated humanitarian zone.
However, the UN and numerous countries say its tactics amount to forced mass displacement and that conditions in the humanitarian zone are dire, with food in short supply.
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Israel had hoped that the vast majority of the more than 800,000 Gaza City residents would leave their homes in advance of a military thrust, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimated that by Monday 320,000 Palestinians had departed. Hamas said fewer than 100,000 people had left the city.
The coastal road heading south out of Gaza City has been crammed with war refugees for days and traffic is moving slowly as more residents try to flee.
The IDF on Monday struck the Al-Ghafri high-rise building in Gaza City, the latest of a number of towers toppled in the last week.
The IDF said in a statement that Hamas “planted intelligence gathering equipment and positioned observation posts to monitor the location of IDF troops in the area”.
The United Nations and aid agencies have warned that an Israeli assault on all of Gaza City, where a famine has already been declared, will push civilians into an “even deeper catastrophe”.
On Monday, the territory’s health ministry said three more Palestinians had died of malnutrition and starvation in Gaza in the previous 24 hours, raising deaths from such causes to at least 425 people, including 145 children, since the war started.
One of the big worries of Israeli military planners is that an Israeli attack will result in the killing of the 20 hostages believed to be alive among the 48 still held in Gaza.
There were reports from Gaza that Hamas has relocated some living hostages to buildings in Gaza City and tent encampments to act as “human shields” ahead of an IDF advance.
Mr Rubio, speaking after talks with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, said the best option would be for Hamas to surrender but agreed that such a scenario was unlikely.
“That would be the ideal outcome that we would all like to see. It has been worked on, but I think we have to be prepared for the fact that savage terrorists don’t normally agree to things like that. But we’ll continue to pursue that route. It’s the ideal outcome, but it may require an ultimately concise military operation to eliminate them,” he said.
Israel’s nearly two-year-long campaign against Hamas has killed more than 64,000 people in Gaza, according to local authorities. It was prompted by the militant group’s attack on Israel in October 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.
Mr Netanyahu rejected claims that Israel’s strike targeting the Hamas leadership in Qatar last week failed, saying it sent an important message, and refusing to rule out similar attacks.
“I’ll tell you what the impact of the strike is: we sent a message to the terrorists. You can run, but you can’t hide, and we’ll get you,” he said. “If they think they enjoy immunity, they’ll do it again and again and again, and if you deny them that immunity, they’ll think twice.”
Before the Jerusalem meeting, US president Donald Trump told reporters Israel must be “very, very careful” about how it handles Qatar, which he called a “great ally”. Following the Doha strike he promised Qatar that Israel would not carry out a similar strike on its territory in the future.
Mr Rubio will travel to Qatar after his trip to Israel.
– Additional reporting: Reuters
