Israel has destroyed 50 buildings and hundreds of tents in Gaza City in two days as part of an operation to force up to a million Palestinians south.
The Israeli military is waging an all-out, aerial assault concentrated on Gaza City, targeting dozens of high-rise towers in the heart of the city and reducing them to rubble. The destruction of residential buildings and tent encampments nearby is part of its stated operation to ethnically cleanse the entire area of the nearly one million Palestinians sheltering there and force them south.
“I promised you a few days ago that we would destroy Gaza’s terror towers. This is exactly what we are doing,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement from the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv on September 08. “In the past two days, 50 of these towers have fallen. The air force brought them down.
Now all of this is just an introduction, just a prelude, to the main intense operation—a ground maneuver of our forces, who are now organizing and gathering in Gaza City,” he said, adding, “And so I say to the residents of Gaza, I am taking advantage of this opportunity, and listen to me carefully: You have been warned. Get out of there!”
On September 07, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the Al-Rouya residential tower in Tel al-Hawa, a neighborhood in southwest Gaza City. The massive blast toppled the high-rise building, sending massive plumes of smoke and ash into the air. Residents say they were barely given any warning to flee the area before the strike.
“They threatened to target the tower about an hour ago, and then told us to evacuate. We didn’t have time to take anything,” Hayam Saad, who was living with her husband, children and other relatives in a tent encampment next to the Al-Rouya building, said as she stood in the rubble alongside destroyed tents and shredded belongings. “I left my things as they were and ran away, with small children in tow.”
Saad and her family were displaced from the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiyya three months ago after an Israeli airstrike on their apartment that killed Saad’s daughter-in-law. “There was blood everywhere in the apartment. We couldn’t find a leg, a head, or anything. We then left the area,” she said.
“There’s nothing, as you can see. Where are we supposed to go now? Who’s going to give us tents? Who’s going to house us? We don’t know where to go,” she said. Her husband, Ahed Al-Abed Saad, said they lost their meager belongings in the attack. “We’ve come here and found nothing. No clothes, no food, no water, not even tents,” he told Drop Site. “All of this is to force people to scatter to the south. Right now, we have nothing; we’re going to sleep on the rubble.”
Hundreds of other displaced families were sifting through the debris to try to salvage what little they could. “They didn’t give us enough time to remove the necessary items from the tents for the displaced or from inside the tower itself for some of the displaced people,” Mahmoud Naim, a 33-year-old from Beit Hanoun, told Drop Site as he stood amid the rubble of the Al-Rouya building on Sunday.
“The tower was bombed in less than an hour, and the area was completely destroyed. The tents of the displaced were also destroyed. These tents housed hundreds of displaced people from various areas—from the north, from central Gaza, from Gaza City, from Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, Jabalia refugee camp, Shujaiyya, Al-Tuffah, Al-Sabra, and all areas of Gaza.”
Israeli leaders have openly bragged about destroying Gaza City as part of a campaign to force out all of the Palestinians living there, as they have in other cities like Beit Hanoun, Rafah, and elsewhere.
The Israeli military first announced the intentional targeting of multiple high rises as part of its assault on Gaza City on September 05, claiming without offering any evidence that they were being used by Hamas fighters. The Israeli military only circulated a video showing the Mushtaha Tower, a 16-story building in a densely crowded western area of the city, with a graphic rendering of a supposed camera on the top of the building as “proof.” In the following days, they destroyed at least 50 buildings.
On September 08, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X: “A mighty hurricane will hit the skies of Gaza City today, and the roofs of the terror towers will shake. This is a final warning to the murderers and rapists of Hamas in Gaza and in the luxury hotels abroad: Release the hostages and lay down your weapons – or Gaza will be destroyed, and you will be annihilated.”
The Israeli targeting of the Mushtaha Tower on Friday also destroyed a mass tent encampment next to the building, where hundreds of displaced Palestinians had fled from neighborhoods in the northern and eastern parts of the city as the Israeli military invaded.
Um Samir al-Ajlouni, who was displaced from the Zaytoun neighborhood, was sitting in front of her tent near the Mushtaha Tower on September 05 when everyone around began shouting that the Israelis were about to bomb the building. Less than half an hour later, the massive structure was reduced to rubble. “When I returned to my tent, I found nothing. The tent was leveled to the ground, and our family’s belongings were scattered and lost. Even the bread I was preparing for my children, I couldn’t find,” al-Ajlouni told Drop Site.
She said she thought of trying to go south in a desperate attempt to seek shelter, but she couldn’t afford it. “I don’t have any money to pay for transport, and my tent was completely destroyed, so I no longer have any shelter,” she said. “We will have to walk on foot for a long distance… we have no other option. The tent we used to live in cost 200 shekels ($60), and today its price has risen to 4,000 shekels ($1,200), an amount most families cannot afford.”
Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal confirmed the offensive on Gaza City that began last month is the most violent attack on the city since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18 and resumed its genocidal scorched earth campaign.
“Over the past two days alone, at least 50 residential buildings have been completely destroyed and 100 others were partially damaged that were housing thousands of displaced people,” Bassal told Drop Site. “The strikes also targeted mosques and playgrounds and led to the destruction of more than 200 tents belonging to displaced people living near the targeted buildings,” Bassal added.
Civil Defense teams are trying to respond to multiple distress calls reporting people trapped under the rubble. “In not all cases do residents have a chance to escape. Most of the strikes that targeted buildings were carried out without evacuation warnings, causing the martyrdom of the residents.”
Among the dozens of Palestinians killed on September 08 was Osama Balousha, a photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted his home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhoods of Gaza City, bringing the number of journalists killed to nearly 250, according to Gaza’s government media office.
In addition to housing hundreds of families, many of Gaza’s high-rise buildings were home to businesses and recreational centers. “This tower is not just a building, as you can see, it’s not just floors stacked on top of each other. These are memories. The tower is the days we have lived. I used to train and spend my days at the gym here,” Maher Haboush, a fitness coach who used to train at Oxygen Club, a well-known gym inside the Al-Rouya building, told Drop Site as he stood amid the rubble on Sunday. “There are no friends left, no money left, and nothing to remember. Even the memories, they are taking them away from us.”
Abdel Qader Sabbah is a journalist and videographer in Northern Gaza.
Rasha Abou Jalal is a journalist from the Gaza Strip.
RELATED:
- Israel can’t (or won’t) explain its use of large-scale airstrikes in civilian areas: Ha’aretz
- 20,000 Children Killed In 23 Months of War – More Than One Child Killed Every Hour
- Mearsheimer: The Nazification of Israel – It looks like the Germans under Hitler
- ‘Every Day, We’re Forced to Choose Who Gets Treatment’: Malnutrition Cases Outpace Gaza’s Health System
- Wael Al-Dahdouh: ‘The Mainstream Media failed Gaza’
