Alexandra Sharp
Foreign Policy / August 29, 2025
Suspending the military’s “tactical pauses” is expected to worsen the region’s humanitarian crisis.
Israel launched the “initial stages” of its planned expanded offensive into Gaza City on Friday, declaring the heavily populated area a “dangerous combat zone.” Foreign leaders and rights activists have urged Israel not to proceed with its Gaza City operation, citing concerns about the detrimental impact that it will likely have on the region’s dire humanitarian crisis.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintains that such an offensive is vital to dismantling Hamas’s last major stronghold. According to senior Israeli officials, a network of Hamas-used tunnels remains functioning throughout Gaza City. “We will intensify our strikes until we bring back all the kidnapped hostages and dismantle Hamas,” Israeli military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on Friday. Ahead of the offensive, Israel’s military called up an additional 60,000 reservists on top of extending the active duties of 20,000 others.
Also on Friday, Israel suspended its “tactical pauses” on carrying out military operations in Gaza City during the daytime. These were first imposed last month to allow food and aid deliveries to enter the area at the urging of the United Nations and rights groups. The world’s leading hunger monitor last Friday officially declared famine in Gaza City and its surrounding areas, and experts now warn that renewed fighting will only make matters worse.
More than half of Gaza’s 2 million residents live in Gaza City. Adraee on Wednesday issued a statement saying that evacuating the city was “inevitable.” He claimed that there were “vast empty areas” in the southern Gaza Strip where displaced Gaza City residents could go, adding that families who relocated there would be given abundant humanitarian aid. In the past week, around 23,000 people have evacuated the city, the United Nations reported on Thursday. Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza surpassed 63,000 people on Friday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
“This will have a horrific impact on people already exhausted, already malnourished, already bereaved and displaced, and deprived of basics needed for their bare survival,” U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said last week of the planned expanded Israeli military campaign in Gaza City. “Forcing hundreds of thousands to move south is a recipe for further disaster and could amount to forcible transfer,” which is considered a crime against humanity under international law.
Netanyahu is facing growing pressure within Israel and from foreign leaders to secure a cease-fire and hostage release deal. Hamas accepted an Arab-proposed framework last week calling for a 60-day truce and the release of some Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners. But Netanyahu remains opposed to the offer, instead calling for the release of all hostages and an end to the war “on conditions that are acceptable for Israel.”
“We will not rest or be silent until we return all of our hostages home—both the living and the dead,” Netanyahu said. Nearly 50 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom only 20 are believed to still be alive. On Friday, Israeli forces recovered the bodies of two killed captives held in Gaza City: Ilan Weiss, who was killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and another unnamed individual.
Alexandra Sharp – the World Brief writer at Foreign Policy
