Gaza City — The morning broke with the sound of proximity: drones tracing circles at roof height, the percussive thud of artillery, the rush to stairwells that are no longer safe. By mid-day on Saturday, local health authorities said at least 91 Palestinians had been killed across the strip, including scores in Gaza City, as Israel drove a renewed ground push through the north and intensified airstrikes that residents described as unrelenting and indiscriminate. Separate tallies earlier in the day put the death toll lower, but the count kept moving—an arithmetic of shock that has become the cadence of life here. The city’s hospitals, already exhausted, were forced to triage by flashlights and phone screens as ambulances threaded cratered streets under the hum of surveillance drones and the sting of quad-copters firing into alleys, with dozens killed as hospitals strain.
In Gaza City’s shattered grid, the sites of the latest strikes told a familiar story. A family home blasted open in a neighborhood that had been hit repeatedly. A tent cluster sheared apart near a school compound. A market lane, the one that still had a vegetable seller and a butcher on alternating days, rendered into soot and fragments. The city’s few partially functioning hospitals absorbed waves of casualties with fewer surgeons than were needed and less oxygen than was safe. Medical staff spoke of hallway surgeries and morgue overflows. The sense of enclosure—of being surrounded, cut off, watched—was at once tactical and psychological. It is by design, many here say, and it is working, with memories of children killed in Az-Zawayda still fresh.
Israeli officials, for their part, framed the day’s operations as a necessary escalation against militant infrastructure embedded in dense urban terrain. They cited strikes on “operatives” laying explosives and on subterranean passages used to move fighters and weapons. Military communiqués emphasized precision and restraint; the images from the ground told a different story to those living beneath it. The competing claims have been a constant of this war, now deep into its second year, but the reality for civilians is less an argument than a condition: the city remains both battle space and home, and the burden of that duality is borne by people with nowhere left to go, even as 120+ airstrikes reported as Gaza City assault expands.
The numbers carry their own kind of authority and their own kind of imprecision. Al Jazeera’s live coverage, based on the Health Ministry in Gaza and civil defense sources, placed Saturday’s death toll at at least 91, including a large cluster of fatalities in Gaza City after strikes on residential blocks and areas near schools. Earlier in the day, wire services cited lower figures—dozens killed across the strip—before the later counts caught up to the day’s pace of fire. In a city where so much administrative capacity has been bombed or besieged, counting the dead is itself a form of emergency work, subject to interruptions in communications, access, and electricity. What is unequivocal is the trend: concentrated fire on the city’s central and northern districts has accelerated in recent days, pushing casualty numbers higher and pressing hospitals past their limits, as the U.N. has warned in repeated updates of only 14 hospitals still functioning.
Hospital directors and emergency physicians reached by phone, often on borrowed power banks, described a system collapsing in slow motion and then all at once. Several facilities in the north have shut down this month, a reversal that aid groups say has stranded hundreds of thousands of people without dependable care. Even where doors remain open, operating theaters run on intermittent generators, sterilization is inconsistent, and basic stock—blood bags, external fixators, pediatric vents—is perilously low. The World Health Organization has warned that the city’s remaining beds and intensive care capacity cannot absorb sustained mass-casualty incidents, with Shifa and Al-Ahli running near 300% capacity. On Saturday, the incidents did not let up. For many Gazans, the phrase “medical system” now feels theoretical, a set of protocols that assume electricity, supply chains and safety that no longer exist, recalling the cancer hospital left in ruins earlier this year.
At Al-Quds and Shifa, two names that have become shorthand for Gaza’s medical struggle, staff spoke of long corridors turned into wards and of family members acting as porters, pushing stretchers when orderlies were stretched thin. In one department, a senior nurse said, clinicians now dedicate a staffer solely to triage at the door, assigning colored tags to patients who arrive in successive waves: red for immediate, yellow for urgent, black for the ones for whom the decision has been made. That is the vocabulary of disaster medicine; here it has become daily speech. A volunteer from abroad, who had been keeping a video diary of the hospital’s unraveling, was evacuated after days of encirclement and intermittent fire nearby, a small relief that underscored the larger absence of protection for those who cannot leave.
Israel’s military said it struck roughly one hundred or more targets across the strip over the last 24 hours, including tunnel shafts and observation posts. It published drone footage purporting to show operatives planting explosives in Gaza City. Those releases have become part of the rhythm: grainy clips, crosshairs steady, a blast in a frame without faces. Residents measure something else—the weight of concrete on staircases, the way dust turns noon to dusk, the difficulty of finding bread when the bakery line has to scatter twice in an hour. In neighborhoods that were labeled “safer” in earlier evacuation advisories, people said the maps felt like a taunt. The notion of safety, once a gradient, now feels like a rumor. Even the official narrative nods at scale, with the army insisting IDF says 100 targets hit in 24 hours, while residents describe families flee shattered blocks.
Internationally, calls to blunt the offensive have grown louder, if not more effective. At the United Nations this week and last, delegates walked out on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address as he doubled down on a promise to “finish the job,” a phrase that landed as a threat in Gaza and as a provocation for diplomats trying to stitch together a cease-fire. Those walkouts exposed Israel’s isolation while humanitarian agencies kept a different ledger: the number of denied aid missions; the kilometers of road rendered impassable by craters and bulldozer cuts; the chokepoints where convoys were halted for inspections and turned back as fighting moved again. The humanitarian system, they argue, is being squeezed by both policy and force.
For families in the city, the posture of the war is not measured in pronouncements but in the small decisions that govern each hour. Do you boil the water now or wait until the next burst of electricity. Do you risk the alley to reach the neighbor with insulin. Do you send a teenager to the bakery if he is faster, or keep him inside because the drones fly lower in late afternoon. Parents here have become logisticians. They plan routes between buildings using shadows and broken walls; they keep backpacks with the documents that still matter, even when no office is open to ask for them. The future, for the moment, is an inventory: candles, a bit of flour, a power bank that still holds a charge. It is insufficient and it is everything.
Numbers also anchor longer arcs. Local health officials say the cumulative death toll in Gaza since the war began has surged past sixty-five thousand, with more than one hundred sixty thousand injured, figures that include a high proportion of women and children—death toll past 65,000—while infrastructure collapses continue to erase the baseline required for recovery. The war’s early shock—the abduction of Israeli hostages, the retaliatory bombardment—has calcified into a routine of devastation with periodic spikes tied to ground pushes like the one unfolding now. Each escalation reshuffles the city’s map: blocks that were damaged become rubble; clinics that were strained go dark; aid distribution points move again, farther from those who need them most.
On Saturday, the displacement within displacement continued. Families who had moved to apartments in Tal Al-Hawa after earlier strikes on Sheikh Radwan packed again for relatives’ flats in western districts; those who had sheltered in a school near Nasser Hospital tried to reach Al-Mawasi and back again when fighting pinned roads. The traffic was on foot, by hand-pushed carts, occasionally by car when fuel and courage aligned. A man who gave his name as Abu Mustafa said he and his wife had moved five times in six months, chasing rumors of quieter nights. “There is no quiet here,” he said. “There is only waiting.” In the time it took to say it, a pair of quad-copters buzzed somewhere overhead and the crowd watched the sky instead of the road.
In many conflicts, the language of “corridors” and “pauses” promises a break in the logic of force. In Gaza City this month, the language has frayed. Humanitarian corridors open and close with little notice and less predictability. Some are announced without routes that civilians can safely reach; others exist only on military maps. Aid groups speak of deconfliction requests that are denied or answered too late to matter. Medical convoys have been forced to turn back from the city perimeter, even as hospitals report dwindling supplies and failed generators. For the international agencies tasked with keeping some minimum of life intact, the space to operate has narrowed to the edge of meaning, and the corporate limits on Israeli military AI show how far the conflict’s pressure has radiated beyond the battlefield.
In the neighborhoods where strikes fell Saturday, the acquaintance with blast patterns has become grimly expert. Residents can tell the difference between an air-delivered munition and a tank round by the way windows shatter and the dust settles. Parents have learned which rooms are less likely to collapse, which stairwells might hold if the facade peels away. There is knowledge here that nobody wanted and that will not dissipate quickly. The city’s scholars of survival are children as young as eight.
The Israeli narrative—of tunnel complexes, of command nodes in hospital basements, of urban warfare against a foe that hides among civilians—lands differently in the places it describes. Many Gazans hear an argument for why their homes can be hit, their clinics closed, their lives reduced to collateral. They do not dispute that militants operate in the city; they dispute that the presence of a fighter two alleys away makes a block of families an eligible target. In the long inventory of grievances that this war is writing into the region’s politics, that point will sit high on the list, along with the U.N.’s repeated warnings about only 14 hospitals still functioning and the WHO’s accounting of Shifa and Al-Ahli running near 300% capacity.
From Washington and European capitals, statements arrive with familiar cadence: calls for restraint, for renewed talks on a cease-fire and a hostage exchange, for mechanisms that might let more aid in. In practice, little changes on the days when the artillery walks forward another few blocks. People in Gaza tend to judge foreign concern by the speed of their phone’s charging—whether there is fuel at the crossings and whether the grid comes up long enough to do the necessary things that keep a household running for another day. Saturday’s answer was mostly no. The hours of usable current were short; the evening belonged to candles and the glow of devices clinging to one last bar of battery.
Elsewhere in the strip, particularly in camps in the middle area, the pattern repeated: pre-dawn strikes into zones that had previously been described as “relatively safer,” followed by waves of arrivals at clinics not designed for trauma. Camp residents who had been scraping by in tented settlements or in the corners of relatives’ homes spoke of long nights listening for the shift in the air that precedes a blast. In one tent city, a volunteer teacher said, the children keep their shoes on to sleep so that if they have to run at night, they don’t lose precious seconds. No one told them to do this; they learned it from watching the adults.
Gaza City’s economy—what little could still be described by that word—has thinned to essentials. A few micro-markets open behind sandbags for an hour at a time. A barber near the port cuts hair with a battery-powered clipper when he can find a charging point. Tailors mend uniforms for medics and volunteers. Every transaction is also an exchange of information: where bread was found in the morning, which street is passable in the afternoon, who has a spare battery pack. Money moves in cash if it moves at all. The banking system is a memory; the future is traded in favors and rechargeable lamps.
As the day ended, the northern skyline looked as it has too often: columns of smoke stacked against the dusk, a smear of orange where a fuel dump burned, the green of a pharmacy sign flickering on and off against a block of broken apartments. Somewhere in that expanse, a surgeon stood beside a table and decided that a child would live and another might not. Elsewhere, a family lifted concrete with bare hands because the fire brigade was busy at another collapse. These are the acts that fill the hours between the public statements and the second-by-second lived war. They do not quiet the artillery. They do not change the maps. They do, however, insist on a truth that the bombardment cannot erase: a city is made of people, and those people keep choosing one another even when the sky says otherwise.
By late evening, the casualty count had risen again and would almost certainly change by morning. The only reliable forecast in Gaza City is that tomorrow will arrive with new damage and the same questions. Will the road be open. Will the clinic still be there. Will there be water at the tap. Will the next strike be near. The international vocabulary—de-escalation, sequencing, verification—does not reach these rooms. The words that do are simpler: hungry, tired, afraid, alive. Across official statements and news dispatches, the themes converged: a tightening ground assault; escalating strikes on the north and central strip; hospitals near collapse; civilians trapped in districts that no longer function; and the absence of any mechanism that could plausibly stop the momentum. Diplomacy will continue next week because it always does. But in Gaza City tonight, under the circling drones, the policy talk is indistinguishable from the weather—talked about, suffered through, and beyond anyone’s control.
