Israel launches ground offensive in Gaza City
Gaza City was engulfed in flames before dawn on Tuesday as Israel launched a new ground offensive, killing dozens of civilians and burying families under the rubble.
Palestinian residents reported heavy strikes across the city overnight, when the military unleashed a massive bombardment as its ground forces moved deeper into the territory's largest urban hub.
The military said the number of soldiers would rise in the coming days to confront up to 3,000 Hamas fighters in the area. According to a military official, the offensive is “the main phase of the plan for Gaza City.”
Gaza City's Shifa Hospital said it received the bodies of 20 people killed in a strike that hit multiple houses in a western neighborhood, with another 90 wounded arriving at the facility on Tuesday.
“A very tough night in Gaza," Dr. Mohamed Abu Selmiyah, director of Shifa Hospital, told The Associated Press.
"The bombing did not stop for a single moment," he said. "There are still bodies under the rubble."
Witnesses said the regime’s overnight bombing reduced a residential block in the north of Gaza City to mounds of rubble.
Palestinian resident Abu Abd Zaqout told AFP that about 50 people — including women and children — were inside a residential building when it was struck overnight.
“I don't know why they bombed it," he said. "Why kill children sleeping safely like that, turning them into body parts? We pulled the children out in pieces."
Meanwhile, Israel’s minister of military affairs, Israel Katz, said in a post on X that the military “strikes with an iron fist” at what he described as “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza City.
He said the offensive is aimed at creating “the conditions for the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas.”
"We will not relent and we will not go back — until the completion of the mission,” Katz threatened, saying, “Gaza is burning.”
Israel has long accused Hamas of building military infrastructure inside civilian areas, especially in Gaza City — allegations the resistance group repeatedly denies.
The overnight offensive came only hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio put the Trump administration’s full support behind Benjamin Netanyahu in a visit to al-Quds on Monday.
Rubio said Washington’s priorities were the liberation of Israeli hostages and the destruction of Hamas.
However, the UN rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, said the aim of the Gaza City offensive is to make it uninhabitable.
“This is the last piece of Gaza that needs to be rendered unlivable,” Albanese said on Monday.
Residents still in the city were warned they must leave and head south.
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