Palestinians run for cover during an Israeli airstrike on the Mushtaha Tower in Gaza City, Friday, Sept. 5, 2025. [AP Photo/Yousef Al Zanoun]
As Israel prepares a massive assault on Gaza City, the Palestinians who remain in the area have been subjected to a new round of destructive air strikes that are wiping out entire residential blocks and sending new waves of panic and desperation throughout the population.
On Friday, Israeli forces struck the Mushtaha Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Gaza City, with at least three projectiles, reducing the 12-story high-rise to rubble. Verified footage and reports from ABC News show the tower collapsing in a cloud of dust, with the shockwaves from the strike shaking tent encampments surrounding it, where hundreds of displaced Palestinians had been sheltering.
According to eyewitnesses, the military issued an evacuation order just 15 minutes before the first strike, leaving many families camped around the building with nowhere to go. The force of the explosion overturned tents and caused panic as people fled. Doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital described being overwhelmed by the number of dead and injured.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said:
The destruction is the systematic erasure of homes, memories, and their community. The city is being leveled and with it their future is torn down one tower at a time.
Hospital personnel reported that it was impossible for the residents and displaced people in the tower and its vicinity to escape in the short time given. The building’s management said the building was filled with civilians.
Israeli projectiles have also struck other residential high-rises, and further attacks are expected as military officials advance the offensive against Gaza City. The measures being taken now by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can only be described as bloody terror.
Fear and desperation among the population are being deliberately brought to new levels in the barbaric genocide that has been unleashed on Palestinians since October 2023. Israel is wiping out the skyline of the largest city in Gaza in preparation for a massive ground invasion.
Israeli officials have justified these attacks on residential buildings on the grounds that they are used by Hamas for “military operations.” Defense Minister Israel Katz, in statements made on social media and reported by numerous media outlets, declared:
Now the bolt is being removed from the gates of hell in Gaza. When the door opens, it will not close and IDF activity will increase—until the Hamas murderers and rapists accept Israel’s conditions for ending the war, primarily the release of all hostages and disarmament—or they will be destroyed.
Katz has issued multiple warnings that Gaza City will meet the same fate as Rafah and Beit Hanoun, which have been essentially turned into rubble by prior offensives. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir confirmed Friday that IDF activity in Gaza is being “expanded.”
It is undeniable that the Zionist war criminals—with the backing of US and European imperialism—have no intention to end the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza under any circumstances. The fascists Katz and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have made it clear that no matter what happens, the aim is to completely seize the Gaza Strip and that there will be nothing left of Palestine.
In the past several days, Israeli airstrikes and fire have killed dozens of civilians in and around the Gaza City, including at least 18 people, seven of them children, in overnight attacks on Friday.
Reports from the Palestinian Health Ministry and hospitals on the ground confirmed that many of the dead were women and children, their bodies recovered from tents and makeshift shelters destroyed in the strikes. Several more were killed in missile attacks on other high-rise buildings and in the sprawling Muwasi zone, where many Palestinians have sought safety.
In just the last two nights alone, over 50 people have been killed across the Gaza Strip. According to an Associated Press report and statements from local health authorities, many of those killed in recent strikes, shootings, and stampedes were attempting to access desperately needed aid at food distribution points or airdropped supplies.
Since May, several hundred Palestinians have died from Israeli gunfire while approaching aid convoys or distribution centers, often after being forced from their homes repeatedly by military operations. The UN and humanitarian agencies have documented how Israel has made the safe delivery of humanitarian aid nearly impossible through blockades and by directly attacking aid-seeking crowds and that this is part of a strategic plan cooked up in the cooperation with the White House of Donald Trump.
The deliberate policy of starvation continues as a weapon in what international human rights groups have characterized as genocide. A global hunger monitor officially declared that famine conditions now exist in northern Gaza, a revelation Israel has denied despite overwhelming evidence.
According to the UN, over 20,000 children have been treated for acute malnutrition. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have denounced the Israeli government for its use of starvation as a weapon of war and for imposing conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people.
Amnesty’s recent report stated:
Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.
The criminality of these measures is multiplied by ongoing restrictions on water, fuel, food and medicine, the destruction of infrastructure, and the refusal to permit adequate humanitarian access to a desperate and exhausted population.
Human Rights Watch condemned the Israeli attacks on residential towers, declaring:
The destruction of civilian infrastructure forced displacement of residents and collective punishment of Gaza’s people constitute war crimes.
Amnesty International issued a statement that said:
Starving civilian populations, razing their homes, and attacking aid distribution points are crimes under international law.
Behind the death and devastation in Gaza stands a detailed “post-war” plan developed in close collaboration between the Israeli government and the Trump administration, with critical roles played by Israeli businessmen, the Boston Consulting Group, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund, and the Tony Blair Institute.
This scheme, as reported by investigative journalists, aims to sweep Gaza clear of its Palestinian population and turn the Strip into a “seaside resort” for Western and Israeli business interests. The plan entails massive new privatization of land and resources, the introduction of special economic zones controlled by foreign investors, and the permanent exclusion of the native population, with the blessing and logistical support of the US and Israeli militaries.
While publicly couched as “humanitarian reconstruction,” the real intent is obvious: ethnic cleansing, economic exploitation, and the utter erasure of Palestinian national rights, engineered by figures like the war criminal Tony Blair and implemented at the direction of the financial and corporate elites behind US and Israeli policy.
Join the fight against the Gaza genocide and imperialist war!
Fill out this form and we’ll contact you soon.
