The, launched on September 16, advances as a summer, ending with buildings, lives and hopes. A fence, a crushing, which today is expected to be complicated, because Tel Aviv will close one of the roads that crosses the strip from north to south, which opened on Wednesday so that the population of the capital exhausts south to the south. There will be only one way. And it is feared that, then, the attacks intensify and shoot it.
At the moment, the Israeli army is moving towards the center of the city from two directions, cornering residents and forcing them to go to the coast in an attempt to expel them from the largest urban center in the enclave. “It’s like a sandwich,” the Qatari television network graphically summarizes.
The Israeli army spokesman, Nadav Shoshani, told the Reuters agency on Thursday that the infantry, tanks and artillery were already moving towards the center of the capital, backed by the Air Force, with the aim of applying pressure to Hamas. Local journalists present in the field, such as Hani Mahmoud, of the aforementioned to the jazeera, add that the invading troops were moving from the northwest and the southeast, “catching people in the middle” and pushing it west of the city, where the Al-Rehid coastal road that leads to the south is located. The only one that will be open. “The attacks on overpopulated neighborhoods are sowing panic and fear, and pushing people literally fleeing to save their lives. We are seeing waves of people who do precisely that,” he said, reporting from Nuseirat, in the center of Gaza.
The inhabitants of the city report on incessant attacks, including air attacks with drones and combat aircraft and remote controlled robots, a species unmanned vehicles full of explosives that the Israeli army has been deploying to fly neighborhoods as it advances inland. The situation in the city is “nothing less than cataclysmic,” as Olga Cherevko, spokesman for the UN Humanitarian Office, indicated. The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that hospitals, overwhelmed, are on the verge of collapse because they are prevented from delivering supplies that save lives.
Israel, like the one who hears rain, eludes those criticisms and insists that their forces continue to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and eliminating terrorist” and that their objectives are to free the hostages that still retain Hamas and defeat up to 3,000 combatants in what has described as the “main bastion” of the group. Civilians do not speak.
At least 40 people died in the city of Gaza on Thursday, according to the Ministry of Health of the Strip.
“The situation of Gaza Capital is nothing less than cataclysmic”
Vital line collapse
In the midst of apocalyptic scenes of these hours, the families who fled faced the heartbreaking perspective of a new displacement in a territory devoid of safe areas, only this time with the very real possibility of never returning home. Israel insists that the South has reserved protected spaces, such as, but some had before and that has not saved them from attacks. There are no guarantees that now it will be different.
Even so, many have stayed. The Palestinian central office of statistics states that approximately 740,000 people – approximately 35% of the 2.1 million inhabitants of Gaza – continued in the north of the enclave until Tuesday. The figures could decrease, he points out, since the continuous Israeli attacks are expelling more people and the basic services disappear. Israel, in fact, estimates that some 500,000 people have already escaped, but in the area there were one million, according to local NGOs and the United Nations, so it remains, as little, the same of surrounding Gazaties, because they have not been able to or have not had the strength to leave, after almost two years of offensive, which this week has exceeded the 65,000 killed.
Cherevko, who works for the UN Humanitarian Office in the central city of Deir Al-Balah, set his case as an example: he traveled to the city of Gaza two days ago, a 29-kilometer round trip that took him 14 hours. And she had powerful means to move, a car, not a car, a donkey, a bicycle or their own feet, like the Palestinian citizens. A displacement, also denounces, surrounded by attacks by Israel, which fall “very close.”
Palestinian families forced to flee from the city of Gaza due to Israeli attacks seek refuge in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis, on September 17, 2025.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) that the last vital resources of the city of Gaza were collapsing and goods, food and medicine, completely exhausting. The Ocha accuses Israel of “systematically blocking” efforts to bring help to people, citing the closure of Zikim’s crossing to northern Gaza whipped by famine and prohibitions of certain foods.
The WHO head, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has denounced that the Israeli offensive was “forcing traumatized families to live in an increasingly reduced and inadequate area for human dignity.” “Wounded and disabled people cannot be safe, which puts their lives in serious danger,” he wrote in X. “The hospitals, already overwhelmed, are on the verge of collapse as the growing violence blocks access and prevents WHO to deliver vital supplies.”
The UN states that there are currently around 1,790 hospital beds for the 2.1 million inhabitants of Gaza, resulting in occupation rates between 180 and 300% in the 17 hospitals that remain partially functional throughout the territory. Ten of those hospitals are in the city of Gaza and one in another part of Northern Gaza. The United Nations Population Fund has also revealed that women are forced to give birth in the streets, without hospitals, doctors or drinking water.
Outside the city of Gaza, at least 10 Palestinians died from Israeli fire in other parts of the enclave, according to local medical sources. The Israeli army reported that four of its soldiers died in the early morning in the city of Rafah, south of Gaza. It is one of the greatest fears of their controls, which fall more, especially for the terrestrial operation, with Hamas knowing every corner of the strip, even crushed.
The United Nations Human Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCT) in Palestine has denounced on social networks the “flagrant contempt of Israel for international legal requirements to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their air attacks on Gaza. A systematic trend since the beginning of the offensive, after Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 (1,200 killed, 250 hostages).
Again, the US veto
And while Israel expanded its offensive yesterday Thursday, the United States vetoed a resolution of the UN Security Council that requested a high fire in Gaza, the lifting of the restrictions on the aid to Gaza and the return of the hostages retained by. All that was not enough for the American friend of Tel Aviv, who claimed an express conviction to the party-military.
The document, presented by the ten non -permanent members of the Council (Algeria, Denmark, Slovenia, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone and Somalia), received the support of all permanent members (Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom) except for the United States, which prevented its approval.
“Our opposition to this resolution will be no surprise. It does not condemn Hamas or recognize Israel’s right to defend himself, and erroneously legitimizes the false narratives that benefit him and who have unfortunately found echo in this Council,” said the US representative, Morgan Ortagus, before the vote, EFE reports.
The United States criticism with Israel since the Security Council exists.
Ortagus insisted before the Council, which today celebrates its 10,000 session, which Hamas is responsible for “starting and continuing this war”, which could end today if the group “releases hostages and renounces weapons.” And he pointed out that the allusion to the hostages in this resolution is “a mere idea of last moment”: “United States will never accept this. President Trump will never accept it.”
This is not the first time that the North American country vetoes a UN resolution that asks for a cessation of hostilities in the strip, something that has been repeated on another five occasions since the war began in Gaza, some of them under the government of Democrat Joe Biden.
