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The Israeli military has killed at least 41 people in Gaza, including 12 aid seekers, over the last 24 hours as it continued to order the population of Gaza City to evacuate ahead of its planned offensive.
The evacuation orders were accompanied by intensified Israeli bombing of the city, the Israeli military interspersing orders with announcements of high-rise towers they had bombed.
“For your safety, take the time to protect yourself and your family members,” Avichay Adraee, the Arabic spokesperson of the Israeli military, said while sharing videos of crowds of people fleeing Gaza City.
The Israeli military has tried to push the around 1 million residents of Gaza City to what it says is a humanitarian zone in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza, for weeks before finally issuing an official evacuation order on Tuesday.
Very few people had left Gaza City before the order, with the UN estimating that only 50,000 people did so over recent weeks. Many residents said they would not leave Gaza City regardless of the official order to evacuate, as they did not trust Israel’s promise that al-Mawasi would be safe.
Israel regularly strikes al-Mawasi despite designating it as a safe zone, and hundreds of thousands of people already live there in tent encampments.
“There is no safe zone in the Gaza Strip. Danger is everywhere,” Fawzi Muftah told the Associated Press as he watched others evacuate the city.
The evacuation order has been accompanied by increasing military pressure and degradation of humanitarian conditions in Gaza City.
Over the last five days, the Israeli military has been bombing high-rise buildings in the city, which it claims housed Hamas infrastructure. It has released videos of bombs striking the bottom of the buildings, flattening them in seconds.
Residents said they received a call to evacuate the buildings about 20 minutes before they were struck. The bombings left many of them without a place to go and brought renewed pressure to leave the city.
Amnesty International condemned the displacement order, saying it compounds the suffering of civilians amid what the human rights organisation has deemed a genocide.
“The order issued [on Tuesday] by the Israeli military for the mass displacement of Gaza City residents is cruel, unlawful, and further compounds the genocidal conditions of life that Israel is inflicting on Palestinians,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Gaza City is in the throes of famine, primarily caused by Israel’s blockade of aid into the territory. Humanitarians have said that a blockaded Gaza City and its accompanying wave of displacement would only exacerbate this famine. They further warned that al-Mawasi, already overburdened with the displaced, did not have the capacity to absorb 1 million more people.
Five more people died from starvation in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number who have starved to death in Gaza over the last 23 months to 404.
International condemnation of Israel’s plans to take over and occupy Gaza City continues to grow. Israel’s unprecedented strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar on Tuesday, which most states deemed a violation of sovereignty, furthered Israel’s increasing international isolation.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, called for sanctions and a partial trade suspension against Israel on Wednesday over its conduct in Gaza. The EU is a valuable economic partner for Israel, constituting nearly a third of its trade.
“Man-made famine can never be a weapon of war. For the sake of the children, for the sake of humanity, this must stop,” von der Leyen said at the European parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said her calls for sanctions would embolden Hamas.
It is unclear if all 27 member states would allow the EU to take the actions that von der Leyen called for, as states such as Germany and Hungary have blocked similar moves in the past.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 64,600 Palestinians over the last 23 months, with many more whose bodies have not yet been found. Israel launched the war in response to an attack by Hamas-led militants that killed about 1,200 people on 7 October 2023.
