The Israel Defense Forces on Saturday struck a high-rise in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, less than an hour after publishing urgent evacuation orders for people in and near that building and another Gaza City structure, amid an intensified Israeli operation to take over the city.
The strike, the second to target a high-rise tower in as many days, comes as Israel seeks to pressure Gaza City’s million-strong civilian population to leave the area and move to so-called humanitarian zones in southern Gaza.
According to the IDF, Hamas operatives had installed surveillance equipment and observation posts in the al-Susi high-rise to track IDF movements. They had planted numerous explosive devices nearby to target Israeli troops. The IDF also said the group maintained underground infrastructure adjacent to the site, used to direct terror activity.
The army said that precautionary measures were taken ahead of the strike to mitigate harm to civilians, including issuing evacuation warnings by using precision munitions and conducting aerial surveillance.
Witnesses identified the building as the Sussi residential tower. Defense Minister Israel Katz shared a video showing the roughly 15-storey structure buckling to the ground in a cloud of dust and smoke.
“We’re continuing,” Katz said in the post, after having shared a video the previous day of another Gaza City high-rise being destroyed with the caption: “we’re starting.”
The IDF has also issued urgent evacuation orders for the Al-Ruya high-rise in the city center and nearby tents, saying the area was being used by Hamas for military purposes and would be targeted imminently.
The warning came a day after the IDF struck another high-rise in the city that the military said was being used by Hamas for military purposes.
Meanwhile, medical sources in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip reported at least 21 people killed in Israeli strikes across the Strip, including 13 people in Gaza City, since dawn on Saturday.
Another six people, including a child, died as a result of malnutrition over the past 24 hours, according to the Hamas health ministry.
The tolls, reported before the strike on the al-Susi building, could not be independently verified. The IDF did not immediately comment on the reported strikes.
Earlier Saturday, the IDF told residents of Gaza City at large to flee southward to a new “humanitarian zone” in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis as the military steps up its operation to take over Gaza City.
In a statement on social media, IDF Arabic-language spokesman Col. Avichay Adraee called on Gaza City residents to “take this opportunity to move to the humanitarian zone and join the thousands of people who have already gone there.”
Adraee called on fleeing Gaza City residents to travel down the Al-Rashid coastal road, which he said has been designated as a “humanitarian route” for speedy evacuation.
In a separate statement, Adraee said the new designated humanitarian zone in al-Mawasi has been equipped with “field hospitals, water pipelines and desalination facilities” and would receive a “continuous supply of food, tents, medicines and medical equipment.”
Relief efforts there “will continue on an ongoing basis in cooperation with the UN and international organizations, in tandem with the expansion of the ground operation” in Gaza City, said Adraee.
Gaza City residents told AFP on Saturday that they believed it made little difference whether they stayed or fled.
“Some say we should evacuate, others say we should stay,” said Abdel Nasser Mushtaha, 48, a resident of the city’s Zeitoun neighborhood now sheltering in a tent in the Rimal area.
“But everywhere in Gaza there are bombings and deaths. For the past year-and-a-half, the worst bombings that caused massacres of civilians have been in al-Mawasi, this so-called humanitarian zone,” he claimed.
“It no longer makes any difference to us,” said his daughter Samia Mushtaha, 20. “Wherever we go, death pursues us, whether by bombing or hunger.”
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, meanwhile, said Saturday that it would be “nonsense” to describe the displacement of Palestinians as voluntary.
The comment came amid a war of words between Israel and Egypt on Friday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Egypt was preventing Gazans from emigrating by not allowing them across the border.
“If there is a man-made famine [in Gaza], the population is being forced to leave its land. It’s nonsense to say that this is voluntary displacement,” he said in a joint press conference in Cairo with Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Israel, which paused the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza for nearly three months until May, rejected a UN report last month that there was famine in Gaza City, and accused Hamas of hijacking aid deliveries.
On Thursday, the military said it had control over 40% of Gaza City. It says it controls about 75% of all of Gaza. The military has been carrying out heavy strikes on the city for weeks, advancing through outer suburbs, and this week, forces were within a few kilometers of the city center.
The UN estimates nearly one million people remain in and around Gaza City, where it declared a famine last month. It has warned of a looming “disaster” if the assault proceeds.
Israel has said it expects the offensive to displace a million people farther south.
The vast majority of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced at least once since the war was sparked on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.
Israel’s military response in Gaza has killed more than 64,000 people, according to the Strip’s Hamas-run health ministry. The toll, which cannot be independently verified, does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Israel says it has killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.