Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - The Israeli military warned on Friday it would operate with “unprecedented force” in Gaza City, telling residents to flee as it presses its ground offensive on the territory’s largest urban centre.

Israel has pummelled Gaza City with air strikes and tank fire in its bid to seize it, nearly two years into the war that has devastated the Palestinian territory and left Gaza City gripped by a UN-declared famine.

The assault comes ahead of a planned move by several Western governments, including Britain and France, to recognise a Palestinian state at a UN summit next week.

The military launched its ground assault on Tuesday and has for days been telling residents to head south, but many Palestinians say the journey is prohibitively expensive and they do not know where to go.

“For several days, we’ve been trying to evacuate to the south, but we haven’t been able to find any means of transport,” Khaled al-Majdalawi, a displaced Palestinian in western Gaza City told AFP, describing “intense and continuous” shelling.

“We finally found a way to leave early this morning. We packed our belongings and waited for hours, but until now, no one has come, and the driver isn’t answering us,” the 32-year-old said.

The United Nations estimated at the end of August that about one million people were living in Gaza City and its surroundings.

The military said on Friday it estimated 480,000 have fled since late August.

On Friday, the military’s Arabic-language spokesman announced the closure of a temporary evacuation route opened 48 hours earlier, saying the only way south was via the Al-Rashid road along the Mediterranean coast.

“The (military) will continue to operate with unprecedented force against Hamas and other terrorist organisations,” Avichay Adraee said in a post on X addressing residents of the city.

“Take this opportunity and join the hundreds of thousands of city residents who have moved south to the humanitarian area.”

- ‘Too weak to walk’ -

The Israeli military has urged Palestinians to head to a “humanitarian area” in Al-Mawasi on the coast, where it says aid, medical care and humanitarian infrastructure will be provided.

Israel first declared the area a safe zone early in the war, but has carried out repeated strikes on it since then, saying it is targeting Hamas.

Nivin Ahmed, 50, fled south from Gaza City to the central city of Deir el-Balah on Thursday, walking with seven family members.

“We walked more than 15 kilometres (nine miles), we were crawling from exhaustion,” she told AFP.

“My youngest son cried from fatigue. We took turns dragging a small cart with some of our belongings.”

Mona Abdel Karim, 36, said she had been unable to secure transport south and had been sleeping on Al-Rashid road for two nights with her family waiting for a driver.

“I feel like I’m about to explode. We can’t walk on foot – my husband’s parents are elderly and sick, and the children are too weak to walk,” she said.

AFP photographs from the coast road on Friday showed long lines of Palestinians heading south on foot or in vehicles piled high with meagre belongings, leaving behind them a scene of rubble and smoke.

- Shelling, gunfire -

Mahmud Bassal, the spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency – a rescue force operating under Hamas authority – reported “artillery shelling and intermittent gunfire” in the southwestern Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City.

He also reported shelling and drone fire in northwestern areas of the city, and strikes in several neighbourhoods.

Israeli fire killed at least 33 people across the territory on Friday, 18 of them in Gaza City, according to a tally of figures given by Gaza hospitals contacted by AFP.

In a statement, the Israeli military said its troops in Gaza City were targeting militants “using tank fire, armed UAVs (drones) and air strikes, dismantling terrorist infrastructure and locating weapons in the area”.

Media restrictions in the territory and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the details provided by the civil defence or the Israeli military.

The US-backed offensive on Gaza City came as a United Nations probe accused Israel of committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials had incited the crime.

Israel rejected the findings and slammed the probe as “distorted and false”.

Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel which sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 65,174 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.