Thousands of Palestinians flee as Tel Aviv opens additional exit route; aids groups condemn onslaught

Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into Gaza City on Wednesday, the second day of a ground offensive that was widely condemned internationally, as Palestinians fled the devastated area en masse.

Israel’s military said air force and artillery units had struck the city over 150 times in the last few days, ahead of ground troops moving in. The strikes have toppled highrise towers in areas densely populated by tent camps where thousands of Palestinians are sheltering. Israel claims the towers are being used by Hamas to monitor troops.

Overnight strikes killed at least 16 people, including women and children, hospital officials reported.

RUSHING OUT

Palestinians streamed out of the city — some by car, others on foot. Israel opened another corridor south of Gaza City for two days to allow more people to evacuate.

Over half of the Palestinians killed in overnight Israeli strikes were in famine-strick­en Gaza City, including a child and his mother who died in their apartment in the Shati refugee camp, according to officials from Shifa Hospital.

HOSPITALS TARGETED

In central Gaza, Al-Awda Hospital said an Israeli strike hit a house in the urban Nuseirat refugee camp, killing three, including a pregnant woman. Two parents and their child were killed when a strike hit their tent in the Muwasi area west of the city of Khan Younis, said officials from Nasser Hospital.

The Gaza Health Ministry, meanwhile, said multiple Israeli strikes hit the Rantisi Hospital for children in Gaza City on Tuesday night. It posted pictures on Facebook showing the damaged roof, water tanks and rubble in a hospital hallway.

The ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government, said the strikes forced half of some 80 patients to flee the facility. About 40 patients, including four children in intensive care and eight premature babies, remained in the hospital with 30 medical workers, the ministry said.

The military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Col Avichay Adraee, wrote on social media a new route opened for those heading south for two days starting at noon Wednesday.

But many Palestinians in the north were cut off from the outside world. The Palestinian Telecom­muni­cations Regulatory Authority, based in the occupied West Bank, said Israeli strikes on the main network lines in northern Gaza had collapsed internet and telephone services Wednesday morning.

CONDEMNATION

A coalition of leading aid groups urged the international community to take stronger measures to stop Israel’s offensive on Gaza City.

“What we are witnessing in Gaza is not only an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, but what the UN Commission of Inquiry has now concluded is a genocide,” read the statement from the aid groups. 

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also released a statement saying they condemned “in the strongest terms” Israel’s ground offensive. The ministry wrote on X that the operation marked a “extension of the war of genocide” against the Palestinians.