The Israeli Army dropped thousands of leaflets over Gaza City on July 10 urging all residents to flee a heavy offensive that has rocked the main city of the besieged Palestinian territory.

The leaflets, addressed to “everyone in Gaza City”, set out designated escape routes to the south and warned that the urban area, previously home to more than half a million people, would “remain a dangerous combat zone”.

The warning follows three partial evacuation orders and came as Israeli troops, backed by tanks and aircraft, have fought Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the heaviest combat operations the city has seen in months.

In one operation, the Army said it had killed militants and found weapons inside the long-vacated Gaza City headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.

Elsewhere across Gaza, deadly strikes have hit four schools used as shelters in four days, sparking international outrage.

The upsurge in fighting and displacement came as mediator Qatar was due to resume talks on Wednesday toward a truce and hostage release deal to end the war, now grinding on into its 10th month.

An Israeli delegation led by Mossad chief David Barnea arrived in Doha for the talks, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their sensitivity.

CIA director William Burns was also expected in the Qatari capital, after holding talks in Cairo on Tuesday.

The latest fighting in Gaza has newly displaced 3,50,000 civilians, said UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, who spoke before the latest leaflet drop and said “there is absolutely no safe space in Gaza”.

One woman carrying her scant belongings through the bombed-out wasteland, Nimr al-Jamal, told AFP on Tuesday that “this is the 12th time” her family has had to flee.

“How many times can we endure this? A thousand times? Where will we end up?”

Hamas, whose October 7 attack started the war, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of escalating the fighting to derail the latest ceasefire talks.

Also Read | Israel’s new strikes in Gaza City threaten truce talks: Hamas

The Islamist group’s armed wing said this week the resurgent battles in Gaza City were “the most intense in months”, while deadly strikes have also hit elsewhere across the territory.

Israel’s military said it had “eliminated” Palestinian militants operating from inside the city’s UNRWA headquarters and found “large amounts of weapons” inside.

The U.N. agency’s head of communications Juliette Touma told AFP it was hard to know if people were sheltering in the building “as we don’t have regular access to Gaza City”.

‘Death and misery’

The Israeli Army said it was reviewing an attack on Tuesday in which hospital sources said at least 29 people were killed in a school used as a shelter in the southern Khan Younis area.

Germany said the strike was “unacceptable” and called for a rapid investigation into the incident.

“Civilians, especially children, must not get caught in the crossfire,” the Foreign Ministry posted on X. “The repeated attacks on schools by the Israeli army must stop and an investigation must come quickly.”

Gaza’s Hamas government said a “majority” of the dead were women and children.

AFP footage showed the wounded being rushed to the nearby Nasser hospital, many screaming in pain, as relatives wailed in grief for the dead.

One wounded man, Osama Abu Daqqa, recounted that “suddenly the strike hit, people were injured and martyred and there was no one to help them”.

Also Read | Airstrike kills 25 in southern Gaza as Israeli assault on Gaza City shuts down medical facilities

Another survivor, Mohamed Sukkar, said that “without any warning, rockets were fired at a group of people who were browsing the internet. They were not part of the resistance nor were they armed, they were all civilians.”

The military said that the strike had killed a Hamas “terrorist” who had taken part in the October 7 attack and that it was “looking into the reports that civilians were harmed, adjacent to the Al Awda school”, which it acknowledged was “near the location of the strike”.

“The incident is under review.”

Three previous Israeli strikes since Saturday on Gaza schools used by displaced Palestinians have killed a total of at least 20 people, according to Gaza officials and rescue services.

Mr. Lazzarini wrote on social media site X that “schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery”.

‘She is alone’

Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, including 42 the military says are dead.

Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed at least 38,295 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

Israel has also imposed a punishing siege on Gaza’s 2.4 million people, eased only by sporadic aid deliveries.

Independent U.N. rights experts on Tuesday accused Israel of carrying out a “targeted starvation campaign” that constituted “a form of genocidal violence”.

Israel’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva accused the panel’s members of “spreading misinformation” and “supporting Hamas propaganda”.

Elad Goren of Israel’s COGAT, the military department handling aid to Gaza, said an average of 250 trucks were entering through the Kerem Shalom crossing, half of the daily capacity — a shortfall he blamed on problems on the Palestinian side.

In Israel, meanwhile, protesters have regularly taken to the streets to demand the Netanyahu government strike a deal to bring home the hostages.

Some of the captives’ relatives spoke about their fear, especially of the risk of female captives being abused, at a virtual press conference by the Hostages Families Forum.

“My life stopped on the 7th of October,” said Simona Steinbrecher, mother of the hostage Doron Steinbrecher. “I know she is alone there and I cannot help her.”

This photo released early April 30, 2024, by the U.S. military’s Central Command shows construction off a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea off the Gaza Strip.
| Photo Credit: AP

A U.S. Navy ship and several Army vessels involved in an American-led effort to bring more aid into the besieged Gaza Strip are offshore of the enclave and building out a floating platform for the operation that the Pentagon has said will cost at least $320 million.

Sabrina Singh, Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters the cost is a rough estimate for the project and includes the transportation of the equipment and pier sections from the United States to the coast of Gaza, as well as the construction and aid delivery operations.

Also Read: How bad is the humanitarian crisis in Gaza? | Explained

Satellite photos analysed by The Associated Press on April 30 show the United States Naval Ship (USNS) Roy P. Benavidez about 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) from the port on shore, where the base of operations for the project is being built by the Israeli military. The USAV General Frank S. Besson Jr. (LSV-1), an Army logistics vessel, and several other Army boats are with the Benavidez and working on the construction of what the military calls the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, system.

Satellite images from April 28 and April 29 by Planet Labs PBC showed pieces of the floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea, alongside the Benavidez. Measurements of the vessel match known features of the Benavidez, a Bob Hope-class vehicle cargo ship operated by the Military Sealift Command.

A U.S. military official confirmed late last week that the Benavidez had begun construction and that it was far enough off shore to ensure that the troops building the platform would be safe. Mr. Singh said on April 29 that next will come the construction of the causeway, which will then be anchored to the beach.

The U.S. military’s Central Command early April 30 published images of the floating pier’s construction online, after the AP’s publication of the satellite photos.

“The pier will support USAID and humanitarian partners to receive and deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” the statement on the social platform X said.

U.S. and Israeli officials have said they hope to have the floating pier in place, the causeway attached to the shore and operations underway by early May. The Pentagon said on April 29 the operation will cost at least $320 million. The cost was first reported by Reuters.

Under the plan by the U.S. military, aid will be loaded onto commercial ships in Cyprus to sail to the floating platform now under construction off Gaza. The pallets will be loaded onto trucks, which will be loaded onto smaller ships that will travel to a metal, floating two-lane causeway. The 550-metre (1,800-foot) causeway will be attached to the shore by the Israeli Defense Forces.

The U.S. military official said an American Army engineering unit has teamed with an Israeli military engineering unit in recent weeks to practice the installation of the causeway, training on an Israeli beach just up the coast.

The new port sits southwest of Gaza City and a bit north of a road bisecting Gaza that the Israeli military built during the current war against Hamas. The area was the territory’s most populous before the Israeli ground offensive rolled through and pushed more than 1 million people south toward the city of Rafah on the border with Egypt.

Now Israeli military positions are on either side of the port, which initially had been built as part of an effort led by World Central Kitchen out of the rubble of buildings levelled by Israel. That effort halted after an Israeli airstrike killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers on April 1 as they travelled in clearly marked vehicles on a delivery mission authorised by Israel. The organisation says it is resuming its work in Gaza.

Aid has been slow to get into Gaza, with long backups of trucks awaiting Israeli inspections. The U.S. and other nations also have used air drops to send food into Gaza. The U.S. military official said deliveries on the sea route initially will total about 90 trucks a day and could quickly increase to about 150 trucks daily.

Aid organisations have said several hundred such trucks are needed to enter Gaza every day.

In the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people and saw 250 others taken hostage, Israel cut off or heavily restricted food, water, medicine, electricity and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip. Under pressure from the U.S. and others, Israel says the situation is improving, though United Nations agencies have said much more aid needs to enter.

Gaza, slightly more than twice the size of the city of Washington and home to 2.3 million people, has found itself on the brink of famine. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the fighting began, local health authorities say.

On April 28, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the amount of aid going into Gaza would continue to scale up.

“This temporary pier will provide a ship-to-shore distribution system that will further increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” he said in a statement.

However, high-ranking Hamas political official Khalil al-Hayya told the AP last week that the group would consider Israeli forces or forces from any other country stationed by the pier to guard it as “an occupying force and aggression”, and that the militant group would resist it.

On April 24, a mortar attack targeted the port site, though no one was hurt.

Palestinians crowd together as they wait for food distribution in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip.
| Photo Credit: AP

A military plane banked over the war-ravaged ruins of Gaza City dropping dozens of black parachutes carrying food aid.

On the ground, where almost no building within sight was still standing, hungry men and boys raced towards the beach where most of the aid seemed to have landed.

Dozens of them jostled intensely to get to the food, with scrums forming up and down the rubble-strewn dunes.

“People are dying just to get a can of tuna,” said Mohamad al-Sabaawi, carrying an almost empty bag on his shoulder, a young boy beside him.

“The situation is tragic as if we are in a famine. What can we do? They mock us by giving us a small can of tuna.”

Returning home to Gaza City with little to keep his family going, another Palestinian man said their situation was miserable.

“We are the people of Gaza, waiting for aid drops, willing to die to get a can of beans — which we then share among 18 people,” he said.

Aid groups say only a fraction of the supplies required to meet basic humanitarian needs have arrived in Gaza since October, while the UN has warned of famine in the north of the territory by May without urgent intervention.

The aid entering the Gaza Strip by land is far below pre-war levels, at around 150 vehicles a day compared to at least 500 before the war, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

‘Increasingly desperate’

With Gazans increasingly desperate, foreign governments have turned to airdrops, in particular in the hard-to-reach northern parts of the territory including Gaza City.

The United States, France and Jordan are among several countries conducting airdrops on people living within the ruins of what was the besieged territory’s biggest city.

But the aircrews themselves said that the drops were insufficient.

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Anderson noted earlier this month that what they were able to deliver was only a “drop in the bucket” of what was needed.

The air operation has also been marred by deaths. Five people on the ground were killed by one drop and 10 others were injured after parachutes malfunctioned, according to a medic in Gaza.

Calls have mounted for Israel to allow in more aid overland, while Israel has blamed the UN and UNRWA for not distributing aid in Gaza.

“Palestinians in Gaza desperately need what has been promised — a flood of aid. Not trickles. Not drops,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Sunday after visiting Gaza’s southern border crossing with Egypt at Rafah.

“Looking at Gaza, it almost appears that the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest and death are galloping across it,” he added.

Buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes in Gaza City on October 28, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned on October 28 there was the potential for thousands more civilians to die if Israel presses a major ground offensive in Gaza.

Israel’s army relentlessly hammered the territory on October 28 after fierce overnight bombardment that rescuers said destroyed hundreds of buildings three weeks into a war sparked by the deadliest attack in the country’s history.

“Given the manner in which military operations have been conducted until now, in the context of the 56-year-old occupation, I am raising alarm about the possibly catastrophic consequences of large-scale ground operations in Gaza and the potential for thousands more civilians to die,” Turk said.

“There is no safe place in Gaza and there is no way out. I am very worried for my colleagues, as I am for all civilians in Gaza.”

Follow live updates from the Israel-Hamas war on October 28

Israel unleashed its bombing campaign after Hamas gunmen stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and seizing more than 220 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

The Health Ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza said Israeli strikes had killed 7,703 people, mainly civilians, including more than 3,500 children.

The U.N. rights chief also condemned the Internet and telecommunications blackout that has hit the Palestinian enclave since Friday.

“Compounding the misery and suffering of civilians, Israeli strikes on telecommunications installations and subsequent Internet shutdown have effectively left Gazans with no way of knowing what is happening across Gaza and cut them off from the outside world,” he said.

“Ambulances and civil defence teams are no longer able to locate the injured, or the thousands of people estimated to be still under the rubble.

“When these hostilities end, those who have survived will face the rubble of their homes and the graves of their family members,” Turk said.

He called on all parties “to do all in their power to de-escalate the conflict”.

The conflict is the fifth and deadliest in Gaza since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Palestinian territory in 2005.

The latest Israeli strikes against Hamas, the Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, were the most intense since the war broke out. They coincided with ground operations.

“Continued violence is not the answer. I call on all parties as well as third States, in particular those with influence over the parties to the conflict, to do all in their power to de-escalate this conflict,” Turk added.

Judith Tai Raanan and her daughter Natalie Shoshana Raanan, U.S. citizens who were taken as hostages by Palestinian Hamas militants, after they were released by the militants, on October 20, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Gaza’s Hamas rulers released two Americans on Friday among some 200 hostages they abducted in October 7 attacks in Israel and indicated that more could follow.

Judith Tai Raanan and her daughter Natalie Shoshana Raanan were back in Israel late Friday, the Israeli government said.

No details were given on their condition but U.S. President Joe Biden quickly said he was “overjoyed” at the news.

Hamas said it was working with Qatar and Egypt to free its “civilian” hostages, in a sign that more releases could follow.

The pair were met at the Gaza border by an Israeli envoy and the two women were taken to a military base in central Israel “where their families are waiting to meet them”.

The American mother and daughter were seized from the Nahal Oz kibbutz near the Israel-Gaza border on October 7. They were reportedly on holiday in Israel at the time.

Follow Israel-Hamas war, Day 14 LIVE updates here

The Ranaan family, like those of many of the hostages, had launched an international campaign to press for efforts to bring them out of Gaza.

Hamas said that following approaches by Qatar and Egypt “(Ezzedine) al-Qassam Brigades released two American citizens for humanitarian reasons.”

‘Sliver of hope’

Gaza’s Islamist rulers said they were “working with all mediators to implement the movement’s decision to close the civilian (hostage) file if appropriate security conditions allow.” It gave no details of its demands.

Israel says 203 people — Israelis, dual nationals and foreigners — were abducted by Hamas gunmen when they launched the deadliest attacks in Israel’s 75-year history. At least 1,400 people were killed, mostly civilians, according to the government.

Israel has responded with a relentless bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip that has left at least 4,137 people dead, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas administration.

The hostages have become a major issue in Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the government would use “any means available to locate all those missing and bring home all the kidnapped.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it helped transport the freed Americans to Israel.

Its president Mirjana Spoljaric said their release provided a “sliver of hope” for the families of other hostages and called on all sides in the conflict to show “a minimum of humanity”.

The release came two days after Mr. Biden made a solidarity visit to Israel to offer support over the attack.

Also read | Israel military confirms 199 hostages abducted by Hamas

“Our fellow citizens have endured a terrible ordeal these past 14 days, and I am overjoyed that they will soon be reunited with their family, who has been wracked with fear,” he said in a statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for more releases “immediately and unconditionally”.

Qatar is a major donor of aid to Gaza and two Hamas leaders are based in the Gulf state. A Qatari foreign ministry spokesman said the country had mediated between Hamas and the United States and that the release followed “many days of continuous communication between all the parties involved.

“We will continue our dialogue with both the Israelis and Hamas, and we hope these efforts will lead to the release of all civilian hostages from every nationality, with the ultimate aim of de-escalating the current crisis and restoring peace,” said the spokesman, Majid al-Ansari.

The Israeli military said earlier Friday that most of those abducted to Gaza were still alive even though some dead bodies have been found on incursions into Gaza.

The military said more than 20 hostages were minors, while between 10 and 20 were over the age of 60.

There are also between 100 and 200 people considered missing since the Hamas attacks, the army added.