Israeli troops encircle Gaza City amid mounting criticism
UN agency questions level of response
As the Israeli military announced that ground troops had encircled Gaza City on Thursday, criticism mounted of the death toll inflicted by Israeli airstrikes, with one United Nations agency suggesting the bombing campaign could be a war crime.
White House officials said Thursday that the Biden administration would urge Israel to periodically “pause” its military campaign on humanitarian grounds, as images circulated around the globe of the northern Gaza Strip neighborhood where powerful Israeli munitions this week had leveled multiple buildings.
Grief-stricken family members and neighbors frantically pulled away tangled piles of reinforced concrete in the neighborhood, called Jabalia, as others carried lifeless bodies from the crater where the dwellings once stood. The health ministry in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, said Thursday that more than 1,000 people were injured, killed, or missing after the strikes Tuesday and Wednesday in the neighborhood. The figure could not immediately be independently verified.
“We have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes,” the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a message on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Top Israeli officials have said their forces are going out of their way to prevent civilian deaths, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also delivered an unapologetic defense of the aerial campaign.
On Thursday evening, he said that Israel's ground forces were “already beyond the outskirts of Gaza City.”
“We are making progress,” Netanyahu wrote on social media. “Nothing will stop us.”
The Israeli military’s spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said Thursday night that “Israeli soldiers have completed the encirclement of the city of Gaza, the center of the Hamas terror organization.”
The United Nations General Assembly, aid organizations and a large number of countries have urged a cease-fire, but the Biden administration has resisted making a similar call, instead pressing only for a humanitarian pause. American and Israeli officials have said a cease-fire would allow Hamas to regroup, and Hagari on Thursday added, “The concept of a cease-fire is not currently on the table at all.”
Israel said its airstrikes were targeting Hamas militants responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis. Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has retreated into a network of tunnels that course through the sandy soils underneath Gaza neighborhoods. The Israeli military singled out Ibrahim Biari, a commander it described as a central figure in the Oct. 7 attacks, and said that he and “a large number of terrorists who were with him were killed” in one Jabalia strike. A Hamas spokesperson denied that any of its commanders had been in the area.
Like the prime minister, Israeli officials have defended their conduct of the war. On Thursday, a spokesperson for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lior Haiat, accused Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields. He said that “the entire responsibility lies on the terrorists of Hamas.”
“No other country in the world is making the same effort as Israel to prevent civilian casualties,” he said.
The interior ministry in Gaza said that another strike Thursday morning in the same neighborhood hit a school run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, and that several people were injured.
Satellite images showed the scale of destruction of Tuesday’s airstrike in Jabalia. All buildings in an approximate area of at least 2,500 square meters, or 27,000 square feet, were completely flattened, with more surrounding buildings heavily damaged.
UNICEF, the UN agency for children, on Wednesday called the scenes of the aftermath of the strikes “horrific and appalling.” Saying that an average of 400 children had been killed or injured each day over the past 25 days of Israel’s bombing campaign, the agency said: “This cannot become the new normal.”
As the airstrikes continued to pummel Gaza, thousands of people sought to escape the strip through its southern border with Egypt, where a few hundred people — including some critically injured people, aid workers and foreign nationals — were first allowed to cross Wednesday. A few hundred more people made the crossing Thursday, according to a spokesperson for the Gaza side of the border.
The contrast between the destructive power of the Israeli military’s weapons and Gaza’s impoverished, densely populated society, where unemployment neared 50 percent before the war began and which Israel has besieged for three weeks, has been on full display this week.
“We barely eat; we barely drink; we barely live,” Nour AlSaqqa, a 23-year-old woman from Gaza City, said in voice messages sent to The New York Times this week. She said she had fled south when Israel ordered people to flee but that she feared the lack of food and water could prove fatal.
“If the bombs didn’t kill us, our living situation will eventually,” she said.
All told, Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed more than 9,000 people, according to health officials in Gaza. At least a quarter of all buildings in northern Gaza, appear damaged or destroyed, according to satellite imagery.
The ground war, which Israel launched Friday, has become increasingly intense. Israeli soldiers are fighting in the area of Gaza City in “face-to-face battles” with Hamas, the Israeli military said Thursday.
“Our forces are already present in very significant areas within Gaza City,” said Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, in a televised statement Thursday. He added that they were engaged in “face-to-face battles” and “inside important facilities belonging to Hamas, operating and destroying aboveground and underground facilities.”
Hamas’s armed wing did not directly confirm the claims of where Israeli forces had reached but said Thursday morning on Telegram that it had fired on Israeli troops near the al-Shati area, on the northern flank of Gaza City, in addition to Johor alDeek, an area close to Gaza’s eastern border.