Israeli strikes killed at least 14 people overnight in Gaza City, said health officials, as Israel ramps up its offensive there and urges Palestinians to leave.

The strikes come as Western countries are increasingly fed up with the intensifying war in Gaza, with some moving to recognise Palestinian statehood at the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly next week. In a statement on Friday (September 19, 2025), Portugal’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said it will recognise a Palestinian state on Sunday (September 21, 2025). The Iberian country had previously announced its plans to do so, but has now set an official date.

Portugal is among other Western nations, including the U.K., Canada, Australia, Malta, Belgium and Luxembourg who are expected to recognise Palestinian statehood in the coming days.

The latest Israeli operation, which started this week, further escalates a conflict that has roiled the West Asia and likely pushes any ceasefire farther out of reach. The Israeli military, which says it wants to “destroy Hamas’ military infrastructure,” hasn’t given a timeline for the offensive, but there were indications it could take months.

Israeli bombardment over the past 23 months has killed more than 65,000 people in Gaza, destroyed vast areas of the strip, displaced around 90% of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with experts saying Gaza City is experiencing famine.

Evacuation order issued in Gaza City

Dr Rami Mhanna, the managing director of Shifa Hospital, where some of the bodies were brought, said the dead included six people from the same family after a strike hit their home early on Saturday morning. They were relatives of the hospital’s director, Dr Mohamed Abu Selmiya, he said.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said five other people were killed in another strike close to Shawa Square.

Israel’s military didn’t immediately respond to questions about the strikes.

In recent days, Israel has been urging hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sheltering in Gaza City to move south to what it calls a humanitarian zone.

Palestinians have streamed out of the city — some by car, others on foot. Israel opened another corridor south of Gaza City for two days this week to allow more people to evacuate. But many Palestinians in the famine-stricken city are unwilling to be uprooted again, too weak to leave or unable to afford the cost of moving.

Aid groups have warned that forcing thousands of people to evacuate will exacerbate the dire humanitarian crisis. They are urging for a ceasefire so aid can reach those who need it.

On Friday (September 19, 2025), UNICEF said lifesaving therapeutic food meant for thousands of children in Gaza was stolen from four of its trucks. The statement said armed individuals approached the trucks outside their compound in Gaza City, and the drivers were held at gunpoint while the food was taken.

“They were intended to treat malnourished children in Gaza City, where famine is declared … it was a life-saving shipment amid the severe restrictions on aid delivery to Gaza City,” said Ammar Ammar, a spokesperson for UNICEF.

In a statement on Friday, Israel’s army blamed Hamas for stealing the food.

Israel accuses Hamas of siphoning off aid and using it to fund its military activities, without providing evidence. The U.N. says there are mechanisms in place that prevent any significant diversion of aid.

The death count in Gaza has climbed over 65,100, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government, since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that triggered the war. The ministry does not say how many of the dead were civilians or militants. Its figures are seen as a reliable estimate by the U.N. and many independent experts.

Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel in the 2023 attack, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251 others. Forty-eight hostages remain in Gaza, with fewer than half believed to be alive.

Published – September 20, 2025 06:00 pm IST

Palestinians gather to receive aid, including food supplies provided by World Food Program, outside a United Nations distribution center, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, on August 24, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, a special U.N. committee said Thursday (November 14, 2024), accusing the country of “using starvation as a method of war”.

The United Nations Special Committee pointed to “mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians”, in a fresh report covering the period from Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack in Israel last year through to July.

“Through its siege over Gaza, obstruction of humanitarian aid, alongside targeted attacks and killing of civilians and aid workers, despite repeated U.N. appeals, binding orders from the International Court of Justice and resolutions of the Security Council, Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury,” it said in a statement.

Israel’s warfare practices in Gaza “are consistent with the characteristics of genocide”, said the committee, which has for decades been investigating Israeli practices affecting rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel, it charged, was “using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population”.

A U.N.-backed assessment at the weekend warned that famine was imminent in northern Gaza.

Thursday’s (November 14, 2024) report documented how Israel’s extensive bombing campaign in Gaza had decimated essential services and unleashed an environmental catastrophe with lasting health impacts.

By February this year, Israeli forces had used more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives across the Gaza Strip, “equivalent to two nuclear bombs”, the report pointed out.

AI-assisted targeting

“By destroying vital water, sanitation and food systems, and contaminating the environment, Israel has created a lethal mix of crises that will inflict severe harm on generations to come,” the committee said.

The committee said it was “deeply alarmed by the unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure and the high death toll in Gaza”, where more than 43,700 people have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

The staggering number of deaths raised serious concerns, it said, about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence-enhanced targeting systems in its military operations.

“The Israeli military’s use of AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight, combined with heavy bombs, underscores Israel’s disregard of its obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths,” it said.

It warned that reported new directives lowering the criteria for selecting targets and increasing the previously accepted ratio of civilian to combatant casualties appeared to have allowed the military to use AI systems to “rapidly generate tens of thousands of targets, as well as to track targets to their homes, particularly at night when families shelter together”.

The committee stressed the obligations of other countries to urgently act to halt the bloodshed, saying that “other States are unwilling to hold Israel accountable and continue to provide it with military and other support”.

In a year of war between Israel and Hamas, the people of Gaza have lost nearly everything: their loved ones, their homes, their careers and their dreams.

AFP spoke to a student, a paramedic and a former civil servant in Gaza, to hear how the conflict has destroyed their lives.

The student stopped in his tracks

Fares al-Farra, 19, was as brilliant at school as he was ambitious.

Two months before October 7 last year, he graduated with top marks and enrolled in Gaza’s University College of Applied Sciences to study artificial intelligence and data science.

“I had many ambitions and goals, and I was always confident that one day I would achieve them,” he said.

Days after Hamas’s attack sparked the Gaza war, the Israeli military bombed part of the university.

Mr. Farra and his family fled their home in the southern city of Khan Yunis as it became a battleground, forcing them to shelter for months in a makeshift camp.

They returned home when Israeli troops withdrew from the area, only for it to then be bombed, demolishing the walls, breaking Farra’s arm and killing his close friend Abu Hassan.

“He always took care of me,” Mr. Farra said of his friend, who experienced with him forced displacement. “He was a good person.”

The hardship of war has chipped away at Farra’s optimism and his hopes for an education.

“It feels like all paths are closed,” he said.

He fears his dreams will no longer be a priority once the war ends.

“There will be more basic needs” to fulfil, he said.

Still, he said he longs for an end to the conflict, and that he can “achieve (his) dreams and goals”.

Paramedic and mother

Maha Wafi, 43, said she “really, really loves” her job as a paramedic in Khan Yunis, because she finds meaning in being able to help others.

“We go to the people to tell them: ‘we hear you’,” she said.

She also loved her life with Anis, her husband of 24 years, their five children and their beautiful house.

But the war forced her family to flee their home and seek shelter in a camp, just as the flow of wounded and sick increased due to the relentless bombardment, piling pressure on Gaza’s poorly equipped medical workers.

Then, in early December, Wafi’s husband was arrested. She has not seen him since.

She worries for her partner, but she must face the hardships of war alone. She takes care of their five children while continuing to work as a paramedic.

“You’re living in a tent… you have to bring water, fetch gas, light a fire and deal with the hardships of everything,” she said.

“All of this is psychological pressure on a working woman,” Wafi said, sitting by her ambulance, before scrubbing blood from its floor.

During the war, she has seen people killed and maimed. She narrowly escaped death when a strike hit a vehicle right next to her ambulance.

All she longs for now, she said, is for her husband to be released, and for life to go back to the way it was before the war.

“I don’t want anything more than how it was before October 7,” she said.

The civil servant turned beggar

Until October 7, Maher Zino, 39, lived a life of “beautiful routine” as a government employee earning what he described as a decent wage.

Together with his wife Fatima, they were raising their three children in Gaza City.

A year on, they have been displaced “so many times that it’s hard for me to count”, he said from his shelter in an olive grove in central Gaza.

Moving from Gaza City to Khan Yunis in the south, to Rafah by the Egyptian border, and then back to central Gaza, the family had to start from scratch each time.

“Set up a tent, build a bathroom, buy basic furniture, and find clothes because you’ve left everything behind,” he said.

Sometimes, they were able to find cover before nightfall.

Others, they’ve had to sleep on the street, said Mr. Zino, who said he’d “never needed anyone” before the war.

In the shelter they now live in, Mr. Zino and his wife have managed to create a semblance of domestic life with a place to sleep, a water tank and a makeshift toilet.

He, too, said he wished things could go back to the way they were before.

“I became a beggar,” he said, pleading for blankets to keep his family warm and searching “for charity kitchens to give me a plate of food just to feed my children”.

“That’s what the war did to us,” he said.