Residents flee as Israeli troops renew Gaza attacks

New incursions show how conflict with Hamas could become protracted war of attrition.

A man leads a donkey pulling a cart transporting his family as they try to return to their home in the Tuffah district east of Gaza City on Monday. Picture: AFP

Israel launched airstrikes and sent ground troops back into Gaza City, where it said militants continued to operate months after heavy fighting concluded there, underlining how the war in Gaza is dragging on nine months after it started.

The operation that began early on Monday morning was accompanied by successive evacuation orders that complicated efforts to find new shelter for tens of thousands of people amid mass displacement in Gaza.

Palestinians under evacuation orders in Gaza City districts first fled west in line with an Israeli directive on Sunday evening, but some found themselves heading into the line of fire, so turned back or headed south in line with a second directive issued on Monday.

Israeli leaders say they are shifting toward lower-intensity operations and preparing for an extended counterinsurgency campaign in the enclave. That could free up some troops to reinforce Israel’s northern border, where tensions with Lebanon’s Hezbollah are escalating. But the strategy looks likely to leave Gaza mired in violence and instability for the foreseeable future.

In recent weeks, Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to areas across Gaza that they had earlier invaded and withdrawn from, showing how the conflict could become a protracted war of attrition. The military says it has returned to places such as Jabalia city in northern Gaza and Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, based on intelligence that Hamas and other militants are trying to regroup there. It said on Monday it had raided and destroyed a Hamas command-and-control centre located in civilian buildings in Shuja’iyya.

Repeated skirmishes in Gaza suggest Hamas, which led the October 7 attack against southern Israel and ruled the Strip for years before that, has survived Israel’s punishing bombardment and invasion as an insurgent group.

Analysts say the group has been substantially weakened. Militants still hold more than 100 hostages abducted in the October 7 raid, many of them dead, according to the Israeli government.

The Israeli military said on Monday that it launched airstrikes and a counter-terrorism operation overnight in Gaza City, where Israeli forces said they previously killed militants and destroyed an underground tunnel.

Hamas condemned what it termed an escalation by the Israeli military in Gaza City.

Israel’s military on Sunday warned residents of the Old City, Al Darraj and Al Tuffah districts to evacuate to western neighbourhoods, adding to large-scale displacement across the Strip. About 90 per cent of Gaza’s population has been displaced.

Amid the sound of gunfire, men, women, children and the elderly left those parts of Gaza City, moving on foot, bicycle or donkey-drawn carts, carrying what few possessions they could manage and often not knowing where they would end up. Locals said some families returned on Monday after a night of powerful airstrikes because they couldn’t find a place to stay.

Mahmoud Qambour, 29, fled his house in Al Tuffah on Sunday night following the Israeli directives. He and his family went to Al-Sheikh Radwan in northern Gaza City but couldn’t find adequate shelter. “Today I decided to go back to Al Tuffah,” he said. “Our home there is totally burned, but I want to die there.”

The Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City was forced by the Israeli military’s evacuation orders to evict patients and stop operating, according to the Episcopal Church, which runs it.

“To our great dismay, our hospital is now out of operation at a time when its services are in very significant demand, and where injured and sick people have few other options for places to receive urgent medical care,” the church said on Monday.

Some people who evacuated to the Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood said they couldn’t stay because the army had returned there as well. The second Israeli evacuation order directed people in Tal al-Hawa to move south to avoid military activity.

Displaced people were unable to leave a UN compound in Gaza City where they were sheltering, according to a UN official. The Israeli military said it had intelligence indicating militant activity in a headquarters for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. The UNRWA agency has denounced attacks on its facilities and their use by any combatants.

Some 59 per cent of buildings across the Gaza Strip have likely been damaged or destroyed since the start of the war, according to analysis of satellite data conducted last week by experts at the City University of New York and Oregon State University.

The Gaza City area, which Israeli troops entered during the first month of the war, has been hardest hit, with around 75 per cent of buildings damaged or destroyed, according to the researchers.

The Wall Street Journal