As Israeli forces move forward, Palestinians face a new challenge.

The Israeli military dropped leaflets warning that forces would seize control of the western neighborhood on Thursday, forcing Palestinians in Gaza City’s comparatively unaffected Nasser neighborhood to decide whether to stay or leave.
As it escalates its full-scale attack on the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Israel has ordered the hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza City to evacuate; however, in the rest of Gaza, people are faced with grim options due to a lack of food, safety, and space.

“It has been almost two years, with no rest, no settling down, not even sleep,” said Abu Ahmed, a father, as he and his family prepared to flee the city in a truck pulled by a motorcycle, laden with some of their belongings.

“We can’t sit with our children just to sit with them. Our life revolves around war,” he said. “We have to go from this area to that area. We can’t take it anymore, we are tired.”

According to medical professionals and local health officials, Israeli forces murdered 18 individuals on Thursday throughout the territory. Of those killed were two persons looking for food near Rafah in the south, five people killed in a single place in the Beach refugee camp, and eleven people killed in attacks on different districts of Gaza City. Residents of the Nasser neighborhood were alarmed by the leaflets that were dropped late on Wednesday, as Israeli ground troops had already conducted operations in several areas of the neighborhood during the beginning of the war in October 2023. They feared that tanks would soon move in to take over the entire community.
Israeli soldiers have been conducting operations in the easterly Gaza City districts of Shejaia, Zeitoun, and Tuffah during the past week. They have also briefly deployed tanks into Sheikh Radwan, which is next to Nasser.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it struck 360 targets in Gaza in what it said was an escalation of strikes that targeted “terrorist infrastructure, cameras, reconnaissance operations rooms, sniper positions, anti-tank missile launch sites, and command and control complexes”.

It added that in the coming days, it would intensify attacks in a focused manner to strike Hamas infrastructure, “disrupting its operational readiness, and reducing the threat to our forces in preparation for the next phases of the operation”.

Families in Gaza City kept leaving their houses in regions that were the focus of Israeli air and ground operations, moving either south into other portions of the strip or westward toward the city center and the seaside.  However, some were unable to depart.

Although international organizations think much more is required, Israel claims it is taking action to stop food shortages in Gaza by allowing hundreds of trucks carrying supplies to enter the territory.

Since Israel attempted to assassinate Hamas political officials in an airstrike on the Qatari capital Doha on Tuesday, the status of ceasefire talks in Gaza that Qatar was hosting and co-mediating has been unclear. The airstrike happened soon after Hamas asserted credit for a shooting at a bus stop outside of Jerusalem on Monday that left six people dead.