About 60,000 Israeli reservists will receive call-up orders that the Israeli military will issue tomorrow as it’s preparing for a major offensive on Gaza City, The Times of Israel reported on Tuesday.
The report said that reservists will have two weeks before they need to report for duty and that not all of them will take part in the offensive on Gaza City since some will replace IDF troops deployed in other areas of Gaza.
The Israeli military’s plans to take over Gaza City involve the ethnic cleansing of over 1 million Palestinian civilians from the area. Since civilians are expected to remain in the city after evacuation orders, the IDF is prepared to use artillery strikes as its means of forcibly moving them, according to Haaretz.
While the IDF hasn’t yet launched its ground offensive, it has ramped up strikes on Gaza City in recent weeks with a focus on the eastern Zeitoun neighborhood. Thousands of Palestinians have already fled the area, and an investigation from Al Jazeera found that many of the Israeli attacks were hitting displacement shelters.
Once the city is taken over, the IDF plans to spend more than a year destroying it, similar to how it made the northern cities of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia uninhabitable. The IDF will demolish homes in Gaza City under the guise of “dismantling Hamas infrastructure,” but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously told a Knesset committee that the IDF’s destruction of homes would force Palestinians to leave Gaza altogether.
The idea of the Gaza City offensive is to force all the Palestinians to the south, and from there, Israel will pressure them to leave Gaza, but it remains unclear where they could go. Israel has reportedly been in talks with several countries on taking in a large number of Palestinian refugees, but so far, none have publicly committed to the idea.
