High-rise in Gaza city razed as Israel presses for tactical offensive; civilians urged to flee south
An Israeli strike levelled a roughly 15-storey residential tower in Gaza city on Thursday, the second such collapse in as many days, as the Israeli military intensified warnings for residents to head south toward a so-called “humanitarian zone” ahead of a planned ground offensive.
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Video circulated by Israeli officials showed the building buckling and disintegrating into a cloud of dust and concrete. Israel’s defence minister posted footage of the collapse and vowed that the military would continue to target tall structures it says are being used by Hamas for surveillance and command posts.
What happened
The Israeli Defence Forces said the high-rise contained intelligence-gathering equipment and observation posts used to monitor Israeli troop movements. “We’re continuing,” Defence Minister Israel Katz wrote alongside the footage — the second time in 48 hours he has shared images of a Gaza city tower being destroyed.
Israeli authorities have said for weeks they are preparing an operation to capture parts of Gaza’s largest urban centre, but have not given a public timeline. Still, strikes and operations on the city’s outskirts have ramped up, prompting fears of a devastating urban offensive in a territory already ravaged by nearly two years of war.
Evacuation orders and scepticism on the ground
The military urged residents to move to Al-Mawasi, a strip of coastline in southern Gaza that Israel declared a “humanitarian zone” early in the conflict. A military spokesperson said aid and medical care would be available there and called on people to “take this opportunity to move early.”
But for many Gazans the advice offered little comfort. Abdel Nasser Mushtaha, 48, who fled his Zeitun neighbourhood and was sleeping in a tent in the Rimal area, said ordinary people had little choice: “Some say we should evacuate, others say we should stay. But everywhere in Gaza there are bombings and deaths,” he told visiting reporters.
His daughter, Samia, 20, summed up the helplessness felt by many: “Wherever we go, death pursues us, whether by bombing or hunger.”
Those sentiments echo bitter experience. Al-Mawasi has repeatedly been struck despite being earmarked as a safe zone, and the UN estimates nearly one million people remain in and around Gaza city amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medical care. Images from across the territory show long queues at aid distributions and children jostling for charity meals in places such as Nuseirat.
Humanitarian toll
United Nations agencies have been issuing urgent warnings. Last month the UN declared famine in parts of Gaza and said a major assault on the city risks an almost immediate disaster for civilians packed into a narrow coastal strip. More than two million people live in Gaza; the vast majority have been displaced at least once since the fighting began.
Health ministry figures from Gaza — regarded by the UN as the most reliable local count — put the Palestinian death toll from the war at 64,368, a figure made up predominantly of civilians. Israeli authorities and international tallies say 1,219 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.
Hostage diplomacy and wider politics
The strikes come as efforts to secure the release of people taken in the Hamas-led October 2023 attack continue to dominate international diplomacy. Militants seized 251 hostages then; Israeli officials say 47 remain in Gaza and that 25 of them are believed to have died.
Donald Trump said this week that the United States was in “very deep negotiation” with Hamas over captives and suggested that some hostages might already have died — remarks that underscored the emotional and strategic weight the issue carries in any ceasefire discussions.
Why this matters beyond Gaza
The flattening of residential towers and calls to evacuate whole districts are distressingly familiar features of modern urban warfare — from Mosul to Aleppo — where combatants hide among civilian populations and whole neighbourhoods become battlefields. The pattern raises acute legal and moral questions about proportionality, the feasibility of “humanitarian zones” in densely populated coastal enclaves, and the capacity of aid agencies to reach people amid ongoing hostilities.
For journalists and aid workers on the ground, the dilemma is stark: how to document and deliver while not becoming instruments of one side or the other. For the international community, the test is whether diplomatic pressure and humanitarian access can prevent an assault that many warn would deepen an already catastrophic emergency.
Questions for the world
As Israeli forces signal an intent to press into Gaza city, policymakers must confront hard choices. Can a safe zone be credible if it has been struck repeatedly? How can hostages be used as leverage without imperilling civilians? And what mechanisms will the international community employ to ensure that any military operation minimises civilian harm?
For families like the Mushtahas, such strategic debates are not abstract. They are deciding tonight whether to move a few kilometres south in search of a promise that may not hold — and wondering, as a young woman pushing for a charity meal once asked a visiting reporter, whether any place left in Gaza can still be called safe.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
