“We’re leaving, but we don’t know where to go. We want to leave, but to where? There is no safe place in Gaza. Even going south is difficult, and circumstances are hard. To go from the north to the south—you have no money, no transportation. It’s extremely difficult, disastrous. There is no healthcare, no food, no aid, no tents, no anything…This is eternal displacement. Not just forced—eternal. What we’re seeing is that it’s eternal. Our children are getting sick, our women are getting sick, people are dying from hunger, and in the end we’re being displaced.”

-Ramy, a resident displaced from al-Saftawi, north of Gaza City 

With full U.S. backing, Israel is intensifying its genocidal onslaught on the one million Palestinians in Gaza City, the largest city in the Gaza Strip. Israel has now declared Gaza City a “dangerous combat zone.” There is very little actual "combat" but there is mass murder and terror being brought down by Israel on the civilian population—forcing people to leave their homes and communities, with nowhere else to go. 

Enormous explosions shake the ground and plumes of dark smoke hang in the sky above the Zeitoun and Sabra neighborhoods, as Israeli warplanes and drones relentlessly strike from above. On the ground, its tanks and troops kill as they go—at least 64 last Monday, 76 the next day, 75 the day after, and dozens every day since¹ —while destroying neighborhood after neighborhood, pushing deeper toward the heart of this 5,000-year-old historic city.

“We are not waiting,” an Israeli military spokesperson said on August 29. “We have begun preliminary operations and the initial stages of the attack on Gaza City, and we are currently operating with great force on the outskirts of the city. We will intensify our strikes.”

Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of Gaza City’s largest neighborhoods, said they had been under assault by Israeli tanks and warplanes all day on Saturday, August 30, and into Sunday. Many families were forced to flee. One resident said Israeli troops were “crawling into the heart of the city… from the east, north and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave.”

Just to the north, in al-Saftawi one resident told Drop Site News, “For about a week now, it’s been constant bombing, shelling, and destruction. Today we were shocked when the army raided our area and bombed it. We were terrified, really terrified. A quadcopter came and they told us: ‘You have six hours to evacuate.’” Another added, “No one is spared—no old person, no child, no woman. No human being is spared."

Israel has destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in the Zeitoun and Sabra neighborhoods. The vibrant and historic Zeitoun quarter, which had existed for nearly 2,000 years, has now been largely flattened. Even The New York Times called it "a barren wasteland." 

With double viciousness, the Israeli army is ordering Palestinians to leave Gaza City but then told them to evacuate to places where the Israeli army's own assessment is that "civilians would be in danger" because that same army considers these areas "combat zones." Or they are being told to evacuate to places that are already so overcrowded, there is no more room—no places for a tent, and no public facilities. 

Starvation Skyrocketing—"Gaza is at a breaking point"

• In July, Israel allowed only 14 percent of the minimum necessary essential food items into Gaza.² All 2.2 million Gazans face severe hunger, even malnutrition, and over 500,000 are facing famine. As of August 27, 322 Gazans have starved to death, including 121 children. “Famine is absolutely ravaging Gaza City,” UNICEF has warned.³ And the nightmare of starvation is greatest of all in Gaza City and northern Gaza according to a major report by food security experts. Now Israel has halted its daily pauses in the fighting—pauses which had allowed at least a trickle of aid into Gaza City.
• “Gaza is at a breaking point. Desperation is soaring — and I saw it firsthand,” World Food Program head Cindy McCain said in a statement following her recent visit to Gaza. “I met starving children receiving treatment for severe malnutrition—and I saw photos of when they were healthy. Today they are unrecognizable… Half a million people here in Gaza are starving, many more are on the edge… The desperation is overwhelming. We can reach them. We need safe routes and sustained access. We must deliver at the scale this crisis demands.”
• On August 27, when 14 of the 15 UN Security Council members called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and for Israel to immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the delivery of food and other aid, only the U.S. refused, backing Israel and opposing the statement.⁴
• The official overall death toll in Gaza now stands at 63,025 killed and 159,490 injured. These are vast undercounts as there are thousands and thousands of people uncounted under the rubble.

This is the U.S.-Israel’s campaign to raze a whole city, clear out over a million people, and carry out the genocidal ethnic cleansing of all Gaza.

As Deaths Pile Up and Historic Gaza City Is Destroyed, Trump Plots Gaza’s Future 

As Israel was dropping American-made bombs on children, destroying buildings, and leveling the historic Zeitoun quarter, Donald Trump was plotting and planning for “the day after” Israel stops bombing the shit out of Gaza. Last week, Trump held a meeting with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and others. Like the blood-soaked colonials of old who felt it was their right to decide how oppressed countries would be carved up and ruled, Trump and these others were reportedly plotting the future of "postwar Gaza."

The content of their discussions, and potential differences or agreements between them, are currently unknown. But we do know that last February, the fascist monster Trump called for the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and the creation of an imperialist “Riviera” on its ruins, even posting an AI-generated video of a luxury resort called “Trump Gaza.” We know that Jared Kushner thinks that "Gaza's waterfront property" belonging to the Palestinian people "could be very valuable." And that he suggested Israel forcibly remove all the Palestinian people from Gaza while Israel rebuilds it.

We do know that the U.S. requires the state of Israel as a key weapon of its empire. As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has said:

This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

With the blood dripping from their hands, Trump and these others schemed over how to best entrench U.S. imperialist rule over the Middle East, and how to strengthen Israel's grip on the region.

On a deeper level, we have to ask:

What right do these monstrous oppressors have to dictate the future based on what is good for their oppressive system of brutal exploitation and plunder of the people and the planet?

What right do representatives of the capitalist-imperialist system, which destroys whole cultures and societies, and obliterates whole peoples because that is what its functioning requires, have to do this to the Palestinian people?

What right do the tyrants running this illegitimate system have to discuss how to further subjugate—or even erase—the Palestinian people, while strengthening the genocidal state of Israel so it can continue to play its role as a military outpost for U.S. imperialism?

The answer? None whatsoever. 

As the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, Bob Avakian, has succinctly put it:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.

We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System

End the Siege on Gaza Now!

Stop the U.S.-Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinian People!