The Israeli military on Saturday said Palestinians in Gaza City should leave for the south, as its forces advance deeper into the enclave’s largest urban area.
Palestinians displaced by the Israeli military offensive shelter in an UNRWA school, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, August 19, 2025. Reuters/Hatem Khaled/File Photo
The Israeli military on Saturday said Palestinians in Gaza City should leave for the south, as its forces advance deeper into the enclave’s largest urban area.
Israeli forces have been carrying out an offensive on the suburbs of the northern city for weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to capture it.
Netanyahu says Gaza City is a Hamas stronghold and capturing it is necessary to defeat the Palestinian Islamist militants, whose October 2023 attack on Israel sparked the war.
The assault threatens to displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering there from nearly two years of fighting. Before the war, around a million people, nearly half of Gaza's population, lived in the city.
Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee wrote on X that residents should leave the city for a designated coastal area of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, assuring those fleeing that they would be able to receive food, medical care and shelter there.
The designated area was a "humanitarian zone", Adraee said.
On Thursday, the military said it had control over almost half of the city. It says it controls about 75% of all of Gaza.
Israeli military officials say they have killed many of Hamas' key leaders and thousands of its fighters, reducing the Palestinian militant group to a guerrilla force.
Defence Minister Israel Katz on Friday said the military operations in Gaza would intensify until Hamas accepted Israel’s conditions for ending the war: releasing the hostages and disarming. Otherwise, the group would be destroyed, he said.
Reporting by Alexander Cornwell
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, whose country plays a central role in mediation efforts over the Gaza war, dismissed as “nonsense” the claim that the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza is voluntary.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington was in "very deep" negotiations with Palestinian militant group Hamas and urged them to release all hostages held in Gaza.
A broad majority of Greeks continue to back their country’s partnership with Israel, even as protests and political figures on the left demand a cooling of relations in light of the Gaza conflict.
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