Gaza City — Israeli air and ground strikes killed at least 84 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as the army pressed a destructive push deeper into Gaza City, a campaign denounced by United Nations officials for tactics that have driven tens of thousands to flee again and again with no safe place to go. The deadliest blasts were reported in the city’s northern districts and along the coastal road south of Wadi Gaza, where families trying to move out of the combat zones were forced to run under the howl of drones and the rumble of tanks.
Local rescue teams described a morning and afternoon of unbroken sirens, smoke, and frantic calls from neighborhoods that had already been hit several times since the renewed offensive began this month. Civil defense crews said whole stairwells had pancaked in three adjacent residential blocks, trapping people across several floors. A medic in the central strip said responders had to mark buildings by spray-painting the numbers of bodies recovered to avoid counting the same apartment twice, a grim shorthand that has become routine in Gaza City’s current siege.
United Nations human rights monitors said the Israeli military’s methods were instilling fear in the civilian population and forcing mass flight from urban districts. That warning aligns with the UN finding that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. The humanitarian arm of the UN has also recorded continued operations across Gaza City and new displacement along key roads, OCHA’s latest briefing. As the casualty count climbed through the afternoon, another wave of internally displaced people carried their belongings southward, some on foot and others in overloaded pickup trucks and donkey carts.
Previously, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, a genocide that remains unresolved in the international system’s conscience. Genocide scholars have already argued the campaign meets the legal threshold; see our report on the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ findings.
Wednesday’s bombardment followed a pattern that has hardened since early September, with artillery and air power smashing blocks deemed strategically useful to armor, then razing adjacent streets thought to shelter fighters or tunnels, and later hitting rescuers and relatives who rush in to search. Residents said the new round of strikes came after overnight leaflets and automated voice calls that ordered evacuations in zones where many had already been displaced several times this year.
Hospitals and clinics, already starved of electricity and parts, were forced to shut down critical services as fuel deliveries stalled and staff shortages worsened. At least two facilities in the north stopped operations this week after damage and repeated evacuation orders, according to field reports and local authorities, detailed by Reuters. WHO’s most recent public health analysis warns of escalating attacks on care and a surge in preventable deaths across the strip, see WHO operational update.
In central Gaza, strikes around Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah killed entire families, according to emergency officials, including children who had been relocated from Gaza City. In the south, Rafah and Khan Younis absorbed fresh damage to residential lanes and the tight rings of shops that had reopened briefly over the summer, a fragile commerce now burnt out again. Aid groups said stocks of antibiotics and painkillers were nearly gone, and that the flow of flour and drinking water had thinned to a trickle past the principal checkpoints. UNRWA’s September situation reports describe overcrowded shelters and unsafe access routes, see UNRWA SitRep 188.
As the violence intensified inside Gaza, the war’s regional echo grew louder. A drone launched from Yemen struck the southern Israeli city of Eilat, injuring more than a dozen people and sending residents running for cover. The Associated Press reported at least 20 wounded, with two in serious condition, according to Associated Press. Israel has struck targets in Yemen repeatedly this year in response to such attacks, and the incident underscored the risk that Gaza’s war continues to spiral beyond the strip’s borders even as international diplomats plead for an end to the fighting.
At sea, activists aboard a multi-vessel aid flotilla attempting to challenge Israel’s blockade said they endured interruptions that included explosions near their hulls, buzzing drones overhead, and communications jamming that blanked out radios and satellite links. Organizers vowed to keep sailing and said no one was injured, while warning that interference had pushed the convoy into unsafe waters. The Global Sumud Flotilla’s account was carried by PBS here, and earlier Reuters notes on related incidents can be found here.
The military’s stated objective has been to capture and clear Gaza City, the strip’s battered urban core. In practice that has meant block-by-block demolitions in districts already hit repeatedly since last year. Satellite imagery from recent months shows fresh scars cutting through residential grids, with cleared corridors where houses stood in early summer. UNOSAT’s damage assessments give a measure of the scale, see the comprehensive dashboard here and the Gaza road network analysis here. Those visuals match witness accounts of armored columns pushing through intersections and bulldozers opening movement lanes, an extension of what we described as a genocidal ground invasion.
For families in the city and its outskirts, the repeated operations have produced an exhausting and often fatal churn. People pack and flee under fire, return to ruins weeks later, and then leave again as new orders arrive. The result has been a migration within an enclave already walled off from the world, a forced circulation southward that turns temporary shelters into permanent camps and permanent homes into ash and rebar. Aid workers call it a catastrophe within a catastrophe, a collapse of civilian life layered atop the original war.
Relief officials say hunger is rising as fast as the body count. Food queues stretch into the night, and mothers have resorted to bartering flour for baby formula and cooking oil for antibiotics. WHO has confirmed famine in parts of the strip and documented hundreds of malnutrition deaths, with a sharp spike over the summer; see the famine confirmation here and the September public health situation analysis here. A UN expert earlier warned that Israel has built a “starvation machine” in Gaza, with famine effects now spreading south.
The headline numbers remain staggering. Local authorities and international agencies estimate that more than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s campaign began in 2023, a toll that climbs in bursts when dense neighborhoods are blasted open. Reuters’ overview on casualties and fighting. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, many with complex fractures and burns that Gaza’s skeletal hospitals are not equipped to repair. In parallel, even senior Israeli figures have conceded the human toll, and former IDF chief Herzi Halevi publicly referenced over 200,000 killed or wounded across the strip.
The political calendar offered little relief. At the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Arab and Muslim leaders sought a path to a ceasefire and a framework for Palestinian statehood, pressing the United States to back a sustained diplomatic push rather than episodic pressure. Publicly, the White House insisted the war must end quickly, even as Israeli commanders widened their campaign around Gaza City. Our UNGA desk has tracked how Western capitals broke ranks at UNGA on Palestinian recognition, raising pressure on Israel’s war cabinet.
Recognition diplomacy accelerated across Europe in recent weeks, creating a new backdrop for UN discussions. France moved first among key allies; see our report on how France recognized Palestine. Chile’s president went further at the UN, insisting that Israeli leaders face international justice; read our coverage of Boric’s demand for a trial. Human rights investigators meanwhile warn that the government in Israel is signaling plans for long-term control inside Gaza and a harder demographic project in the West Bank, conditions that would entrench displacement documented by OCHA.
Inside Gaza City, Wednesday’s fighting again converged around the same knot of districts that have traded hands or been leveled several times since the spring. Residents described house-to-house searches and explosions that came in waves. Some people said they avoided carrying phones for fear of being tracked, while others said phones were the only way to navigate a new map of cratered streets and sudden dead ends. A teacher in Tal al-Hawa said she kept a go bag by the door with identity cards, family photos, and a few notebooks, a museum of a life that has shrunk to the space under a stairwell.
Education and livelihood, never stable in the enclave, have edged closer to collapse. Universities remain shuttered, and primary schools that doubled as shelters are now often targeted zones. Fishermen cannot reach traditional waters without risking interception, and farmers whose fields once fed local markets now cultivate among shrapnel and unexploded ordnance. Small businesses that survived last summer’s lulls have closed for lack of inventory and power. The strip’s economic core, the workshops, clinics, garages, and corner stores, is a shadow of itself, and every new strike erases another node that made daily life possible.
By nightfall, the strike count and the death tally were still moving in the wrong direction. The army said it was hunting commanders and cutting supply lines. Residents said the bombs made no distinction between a fighter and a father carrying a sack of bread. Aid workers said they would return to the rubble at first light and start again. It is the rhythm of this war, a city taken and retaken, a population uprooted again and again, a ledger of promises made at the UN that does not slow the next missile launch.
The day ended with few certainties beyond the fact of more damage in the morning. Diplomats spoke of benchmarks and guardrails, commanders spoke of corridors and control. On the ground, families spoke of the simple math that governs their lives, where to find water, where to hide from the next strike, and whether the road south is passable long enough to try to cross it. That exhausted calculation is the real timetable of Gaza City’s war, and on Wednesday it grew harsher still.
