Israel intensifies ground attacks on Gaza City amid despair among a million residents

BarcelonaIsraeli forces have intensified their attacks on Gaza City in recent hours and have begun to encircle it. According to Al Jazeera sources in the Palestinian enclave, two infantry and armored brigades are operating in the Zeitoun neighborhood, on the outskirts of the Strip's capital, following heavy air and naval bombardments, while another brigade is operating in the Jabalia camp in the north. The declared objective It is the conquest of the city, still inhabited by nearly a million people, subjected to a relentless siege and with no safe evacuation routes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the final green light to the military plan to take Gaza this Thursday afternoon. "I arrived today at the Gaza Division to approve the plans that the Defense Forces presented to me and the Minister of Defense to take Gaza City and defeat Hamas," the leader announced in a video.

Throughout the day today, Israeli forces attacked the densely populated neighborhoods of Tuffah, Shujayea, and Zeitoun. Residents have seen how in a matter of hours the ruined streets were transformed into the new front lines. The redoubled military pressure has unleashed a new chaotic and desperate exodus. Thousands of civilians have begun leaving Gaza City on foot, carrying bags, mattresses, or children on their shoulders, unsure of where to go or whether they will find a safe place. Entire families have abandoned shelters in the face of the imminent threat of urban fighting and constant bombing. "We don't know where we're going, we're just fleeing," one man explained on television.

But not everyone can flee. After five months of a humanitarian blockade and exposure to constant bombing, the number of sick and wounded is extremely high. For this reason, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Minister on Thursday rejected the army's latest evacuation order, which required all hospitals in Gaza City to move south in view of an imminent offensive. The minister justified the decision by considering that moving all the hospitals to the south, in addition to the logistical difficulties it would present, would deprive "more than a million people of their right to receive medical treatment" and "expose the lives of residents, patients, and the wounded to imminent danger."

For its part, Hamas has denounced the offensive as a flagrant violation of international mediation to achieve a ceasefire and has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wanting to impose his vision of the conflict by military means. The Israeli leader says he has ordered the start of negotiations to release all the hostages held in Gaza and to end the war "on terms acceptable to Israel." The decision is part of a strategy to distort the narrative by making demands unacceptable to Hamas—which, if it agrees, would definitively lose its last remaining bargaining chip—to justify the total invasion of the Strip in front of its population, which is demanding an immediate end to the conflict.

While Netanyahu justifies the offensive to "defeat the last bastion of Hamas terrorists," an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian in collaboration with the Israeli newspaper +972, notes today that at least 83% of the Palestinian deaths in this war were civilians. The report, based on classified Israeli intelligence data, states that the army had recorded 8,900 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters as "killed" or "probably killed," a figure that represents only 17% of the total Palestinian deaths to date.

Evacuation orders now affect more than 90% of Gaza. In this context, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that "it is vital to immediately achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and the unconditional release of all hostages, and to avoid the mass death and destruction that a military operation against the city would inevitably cause." He also called for a reversal of the Israeli decision to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank, which he considers "a violation of international law."

The fact that both information and images of the invasion are arriving sparsely is due to the lack of journalists on the ground. This Thursday, 27 countries, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, issued a statement demanding that Israel grant "immediate and independent access to foreign media" in Gaza. The statement, which highlights the "essential role" of journalists "in highlighting the devastating reality of the war," comes ten days after Israel will kill the entire staff of the Al Jazeera news agency in Gaza City., thus making it difficult to recount the assault on the city that had already been planned at that time. These murders sparked a wave of indignation that reached Catalonia.

Israel has barred international journalists from entering the Strip since the start of the conflict, leaving the only reporters on the war scene to be Palestinian journalists, whom Tel Aviv often labels as terrorists to justify their murder. Since 7 October 2023, Gaza has been nearly 270 journalists killed, making this war the deadliest in history for reporters.

West Bank Breakaway

At the same time, the international community has reacted harshly to the Israeli-approved project, known as E1, which envisions an expansion of settlements in the West Bank along a strategic corridor between Jerusalem and the Ma'ale Adumim settlement. European governments, the European Union, and the UN have condemned the decision because it irreversibly fractures the Palestinian territory and makes the creation of a future sovereign state unviable. The foreign ministers of 22 states—including France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain—have called the decision "unacceptable" and contrary to "international law." "If implemented, these settlement plans would be a flagrant violation of international law and would divide a future Palestinian state in two, seriously undermining a two-state solution."

These military and political moves are part of a broader discourse by Netanyahu, who has repeatedly invoked the concept of "Greater Israel." A rhetoric that is not only symbolic: it poses a direct threat to the peace agreements signed with neighbors such as Jordan and Egypt, and a violation of international conventions that prohibit territorial expansion by force.

From the perspective of international law, the occupation and colonization of Palestinian territories constitute a serious and ongoing violation of the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and resolutions such as Security Council resolution 2334, which in 2016 declared all settlement activity illegal. However, the Israeli government, pushed by far-right ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich, accelerated settlement construction to eliminate any option for a viable Palestinian state.