The Israeli military destroyed a high-rise in Gaza City yesterday, shortly after announcing it would target tall buildings identified as being used by Hamas ahead of its planned seizure of the urban hub.
Despite mounting pressure at home and abroad to halt its nearly two-year offensive in Gaza, Israel has been calling up reinforcements, intensifying its bombardments and closing in on Gaza City ever since announcing its intention to capture the Palestinian territory’s largest city.
In a statement yesterday, the military said it had “identified significant Hamas fighters’ activity within a wide variety of infrastructure sites in Gaza City, and particularly in high-rise buildings,” adding it would target those sites “in the coming days.”
Less than an hour later, it issued another statement announcing it had struck one such high-rise, accusing Hamas of using it “to advance and execute attacks against troops in the area.”
The army said that before the strike, “precautionary measures were taken in order to mitigate harm to civilians,” including prior warnings.
A footage showed the Mushtaha Tower in the city’s Al Rimal neighbourhood collapsing after a massive explosion at its base, sending a thick cloud of smoke and dust billowing into the sky.
Photographs of the aftermath showed Palestinians inspecting the rubble and debris of the collapsed building.
Arej Ahmed, a 50-year-old displaced Palestinian who lives in a tent in the southwest of Gaza City, said that her husband “saw residents of the Mushtaha Tower throwing their belongings from the upper floors to take them and flee before the strike.”
“Less than half an hour after the evacuation orders, the tower was bombed,” she said by telephone.
Israel “orders the residents of towers to evacuate, claiming it wants to avoid civilian casualties. But what about us – hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians in the tents surrounding these buildings?” she asked.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli strikes killed at least 30 people yesterday in and around Gaza City, an area the United Nations estimates is home to nearly one million people and where it has declared a famine.
Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a statement yesterday that “the bolt has now been removed from the gates of hell in Gaza,” vowing to intensify operations until Hamas accepts Israel’s terms to end the war.
Meanwhile, Hamas released a video yesterday of two Israeli hostages seized from a music festival in Israel in October 2023, and one said he was being held in Gaza City, where the Israeli military has launched a major offensive to wipe out Hamas.
Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Alon Ohel are two of 48 people still being held by Hamas in Gaza, with 20 thought to be still alive.
Hamas took 251 hostages into the enclave after its cross-border attack on southern Israeli communities in 2023 that killed about 1,200 people, triggering the war.
More than 64,000 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza, local health authorities say, with much of the enclave laid in ruins and its residents facing a humanitarian crisis.
The video was edited and featured an exhausted-looking Gilboa-Dalal speaking for around three-and-a-half minutes.
He is seen in a car for some of the video dated August 28.
Reuters could not independently determine when the video was recorded.
He says that he is being held in Gaza City along with several other hostages and that he is afraid of being killed by Israel’s offensive on the city.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military last month to capture Gaza’s largest urban centre, Gaza City, attacking what the government calls the last bastion of Hamas.
An Israeli military spokesman said on Thursday that it now controls about 40 per cent of the city, where about one million people lived prior to the war. The military controls about 75pc of Gaza.
Finland is joining a declaration on a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian question and implementation of a two-state solution, the Nordic country said in a statement yesterday.
The declaration is the result of an international conference at the UN in July hosted by Saudi Arabia and France on the decades-long conflict. The US and Israel boycotted the event.
“The process led by France and Saudi Arabia is the most significant international effort in years to create the conditions for a two-state solution,” Finland’s foreign minister Elina Valtonen said on X.
The first step outlined in the declaration is to end the nearly two year long war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Saudi Arabia and France have called on countries at the United Nations to support the declaration that outlines “tangible, timebound, and irreversible steps” towards implementing a two-state solution.
Unlike some other European nations, such as Spain and Norway, Finland has not recognised Palestine as a state. The Finnish coalition government is internally divided over a formal recognition.
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