Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that taking over Gaza City will convince Hamas to give up the remaining hostages and will lead to the group's defeat. The IDF on Tuesday morning issued its largest evacuation order yet for Gaza City. The scope and immediacy of the order signaled that the military's full-scale invasion may finally be close.
Past evacuation orders were localized in a specific area or used wording that suggested that an invasion was coming soon, but was less imminent. To date, Israeli political and military officials have spent weeks trying to get Palestinian civilians to evacuate Gaza City, but only around 100,000 out of around one million have left, leaving the timing of the invasion in question.
A senior defense official has said that Hamas was actively blocking many Palestinian civilians from evacuating. At the start of the war in October 2023, the IDF spent around three weeks pounding Gaza City and nearby areas with aerial bombardments and artillery and tank fire before sending five divisions (between 25,000-50,000) of ground forces in, along with a much larger group of forces which surrounded portions of Gaza. (Read More)
