Israel’s Gaza City demolitions fan fears of permanent removal of Palestinians

Dawoud Abu Alkas, Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Olivia Le Poidevin

GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian bank worker Shady Salam al -Rayyes has paid a $ 93,000 mortgage in a modern block of one of the main neighborhoods of Gaza City. Now, after he escaped from an Israeli destruction strike that washed the building in the cloud of black smoke and dust.

The September 5 attack on the 15 -storey Mushtaha tower pointed to the beginning of an intensive Israeli military destruction campaign targeting high -rise buildings before an attack on the heart of the intense population that started this week.

For the last two weeks, the Israeli Armed Forces say they have destroyed the 20 Gaza City Tower blocks, which they said it was used by Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 50 “terrorist tower” was destroyed.

The campaign made hundreds of people homeless. Within the framework of a similar time, the Israeli forces said that the city has given to ten calm Reuters among others in the areas of Zeitou, Tufah, Shejaia and Sheikh al-Radwan. Since August, the damage to the scores of the buildings in Sheikh Al-Radwan can be seen in satellite images examined by the news agency.

Al-Rayyes said he was afraid that destruction aimed at permanently cleaned from the city of Gaza, a view shared by the UN Human Rights Office (Ohchr). Spokesman Thameen al-Kheetan said in a statement that such a deliberate effort to change the population will be equivalent to ethnic cleansing.

Al-Rayyes on Wednesday, “I never thought I would leave the City of Gaza, but the explosions are constantly.” He said. “I can’t risk the safety of my children, so I’m packing and going south.”

However, Al-Rayyes promised to leave Gaza completely completely.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that most of Gaza will soon be “completely destroyed” in May and that the population was limited to a narrow terrain lane near the Egyptian border.

Israel, which was called to leave all civilian residents of Gaza City during the attack, closed a transition to Northern Gaza last week and limited scarce food materials further.

In response to questions for this story, Israel’s military spokesman Lieutenant-Albay Nadav Shoshani said, “There is no strategy to straighten Gaza.” He said that the aim of the army was to destroy Hamas and bring hostages home.

The Islamist militant group used civilians as human shields, and at the same time put a boob trap in the buildings, Hamas used high buildings to observe and attack Israeli forces. Israeli soldiers are regularly killed by IEDs in Gaza.

Hamas refused to use housing towers to attack the Israeli forces.

The goals of the Israeli army and politicians are not always compatible, and two Israeli security sources referred to Reuters, one of them referred to ideas such as cleaning Palestinians to leave military goals for future redevelopment. Israeli Prime Minister’s Office did not respond immediately to the request for comments.

The attack, the last stage in Israel’s war in Gaza, killed more than 65,000 Palestinians, spread famine and displaced most of the population in many cases, because Hamas killed 1,200 in Israel on October 7, 2023 and took 251 hostages. A total of 48 hostages remain in Gaza and are thought to be around 20 live.

Last week, the UN investigation found that Israel was doing genocide in Gaza. Israel described the finding as a “scandal”. UN experts say that the destruction of civil housing and infrastructure may mean a war crime.

Israeli spokesman Shoshani said that the buildings are legitimate military targets approved by an intelligence officer and a law officer.

After the evacuation order “panic, fear”

Before the war, the Mushtaha Tower was popular with the professional class of Gaza City, and the students were drawn to the ocean view and a public park and a suitable position near the two universities.

Initially, it was about 50 families, but in recent months, people have doubled because they were located in relatives of other parts of Gaza.

The scores of the tents, which contained more displaced family, spread to the base of the tower. The upper floors of the building were damaged by previous strikes.

On the morning of 5 September, a neighboring Israeli army received a call from the officer to spread the building to release the building within a few minutes, or “they will reduce it to our heads.”

Reuters could not independently confirm his account on the evacuation order. It is consistent with the accounts of the residents of other buildings before Israeli strikes. Shoshani said that the army gave time to the residents to be evacuated and allowed civilians to leave before hitting the buildings.

“Panic, fear, confusion, loss, hopelessness and pain were overwhelmed. I saw people running on our bare feet; some of them didn’t even get their mobile phones or documents. I didn’t get passports or identity cards,” he said once hoped to pay mortgage this year.

“We didn’t carry anything with us, my wife and two children, man, 9 and 11 -year -old Shahd went down the stairs and fled.”

The video taken by Reuters shows what happened later. From the air, two bullets exploded at the base of the tower almost at the same time and destroyed within about six seconds. Dust smoke and rash, scattered, running and screaming people fluctuated in the streets and tents.

In response to a question from Reuters, the Israeli army said that Hamas was “underground infrastructure” because he attacked Israeli troops under the Mushtaha tower. The army rejected the request to provide evidence.

In response to Reuters on Wednesday, the UN Ohchr said that the Israeli army did not provide evidence to show that other buildings, which are defined as terrorist infrastructure, are valid military targets.

Al-Rayyes, who chaired the inhabitants of the building, said that even if there is a hamas presence that deny the destruction tactic, it is not logical.

“Even with him, they could handle people to destroy a 16 -storey building,” he said.

A few weeks later with his family in the Sabra region of the city, al-Rayyes left like hundreds of thousands of other inhabitants of the city since August, and on Thursday, he was setting up a tent in the center of Gaza’s Deir al-Balah.

Military is washing houses at the foot of the city of Gaza

While preparing for the ground attack, a dozen house was destroyed every day in Zeitou, Tufah and Shejaia in recent weeks, and the residents spoke.

Amjad Al-Shawa, president of the Palestinian Local NGO network, estimates that more than 65% of buildings and houses in Gaza have been destroyed during the war or suffered severe damage. Satellite images of several neighborhoods have suffered great damage to suburban regions in recent weeks.

Conflict Place and Event Data (ACLED), a non -profit organization that collects data about the conflicts in the world, has documented more than 170 demolition events carried out by Israel’s armed forces in Gaza City since August, as well as controlled explosions in the eastern regions, as well as Zeitoun and Sabra.

“The tempo and scope of destruction seems more comprehensive than previous periods,” he told ACLED’s senior Middle East analyst Ameh Mehvar Reuters. He said. Compared to the first 15 months of the war, such destruction was recorded in the city of Gaza, he said.

Speaking with Reuters, the residents reported that Israeli forces had blown away vehicles full of explosives in Sheikh Radwan and Tel Al-Hawa neighborhoods and destroyed many houses in the last two weeks.

Military spokesman Shoshani confirmed the use of ground -based explosives against buildings defined as military targets. He said he did not know about vehicles with explosives, especially.

The UN Ohchr said that some neighborhoods have been destroyed and documented the controlled destruction of the housing infrastructure.

Even before the current attack in Gaza, according to the latest data of the United Nations Satellite Center, which gathered in July, about 80% of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since the war began. This includes 213 hospitals and 1,029 schools.

Bushra Khalidi, who pioneered politics in Gaza in Oxfam, warned that it was one of the last shelter forms of the tower blocks and that pushing people out of the south would become “exponentially” overcrowded.

A 23-year-old financial student from Sabra, Tareq Abdel-Al, said he was tired of being ordered to be released many times in the war despite the bombings that lasted for weeks in the region. On the morning of August 19, they left their 3 -storey houses after the collapse of the neighboring houses.

Only 12 hours later, an Israeli strike said that the strike destroyed the family house.

“If we were stayed, we’d have been killed that night,” Abdel-Al said, Reuters by telephoning the Nuseirat camp in the center of Gaza.

He said, “They destroyed our hope of going back.”

(Dawoud Abu Alkas in Gaza, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Olivia Poidevin in Geneva, Catherine Cartier, Vinaya K, Tiffany Le, Tamar Uriel Beeri and Edmund Blair;