CAIRO: Israel pushed tanks deeper into Gaza City and detonated explosives-laden vehicles in one suburb as airstrikes killed at least 19 people on Monday, Palestinian officials and witnesses said.
Reports of the offensive came as the president of the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association said it had passed a resolution saying the legal criteria have been met to establish that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
There was no immediate response from Israel on the reported offensive or on the statement from the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Israel has in the past strongly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
The Israeli military said its forces were continuing to fight Hamas across the enclave and over the past day had struck several military structures and outposts that had been used to stage attacks on its troops.
Residents said Israeli forces sent old armored vehicles into the eastern parts of the overcrowded Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, then blew them up remotely, destroying several houses and forcing more families to flee.
Israel is pushing ahead with a plan to take full control of the whole Gaza Strip, starting with Gaza City, with the goal of destroying Hamas after nearly two years of war.
In leaflets dropped over Gaza City, its military told residents to head south immediately, saying the army intended to expand its offensive westward of the city.
“People are confused, stay and die, or leave toward nowhere,” Sheikh Radwan resident Mohammad Abu Abdallah told Reuters.
“It was a night of horror, explosions never stopped, and the drones never stopped hovering over the area. Many people quit their homes fearing for their lives, while others have no idea where to go,” the 55-year-old said over a chat app.

SECURITY CABINET CONVENED
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security cabinet late on Sunday to discuss a new offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as the bastion of Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Local health authorities said the 14 people, including women and children, were killed in Israeli airstrikes on houses in Gaza City as tanks briefly crossed into Sheikh Radwan.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on those reports.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in.
Israel’s military has warned its political leaders that the planned Gaza City offensive could endanger hostages still being held by Hamas. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in past weeks.
The war began with a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 taken hostage. Twenty of the remaining 48 hostages are believed to still be alive.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 63,000 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health officials, and it has plunged the enclave into a humanitarian crisis and left much of it in ruins.
Ceasefire talks ended in July in deadlock and efforts to revive them have so far failed.

THE HAGUE: The world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has passed a resolution saying that the legal criteria have been met to establish Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, its president said on Monday.
Eighty-six percent of those who voted among the 500-member International Association of Genocide Scholars backed the resolution declaring: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).”
There was no immediate response from the Israeli foreign ministry. Israel has in the past strongly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide and says they are justified as self defense. It is fighting a
case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague that accuses it of genocide.
Israel launched its assault on the Gaza Strip in October, 2023, after fighters from Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in control of the territory, attacked Israeli communities, killing 1,200 people and capturing more than 250 hostages.
Since then, Israel’s military action has killed 63,000 people, damaged or destroyed most buildings in the territory and forced nearly all its residents to flee their homes at least once. A global hunger monitor relied on by the United Nations says parts of the territory are now suffering a man-made
famine, which Israel also denies.
In Gaza, Hamas welcomed the resolution: “This prestigious scholarly stance reinforces the documented evidence and facts presented before international courts,” said Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office.
The resolution “places a legal and moral obligation on the international community to take urgent action to stop the crime, protect civilians, and hold the leaders of the occupation accountable,” he said.
Since its founding in 1994, the genocide scholars’ association has passed nine resolutions recognizing historic or ongoing episodes as genocides.
The 1948 UN Genocide Convention, adopted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, defines genocide as crimes committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
It requires all countries to act to prevent and stop genocide.
Criminal acts comprising genocide include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, creating conditions calculated to destroy them, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children to other groups.
The three-page resolution adopted by the scholars calls on Israel to “immediately cease all acts that constitute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, including deliberate attacks against and killing of civilians including children; starvation; deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, fuel, and other items essential to the survival of the population; sexual and reproductive violence; and forced displacement of the population.”
The resolution also states that the Hamas attack on Israel which precipitated the war constituted international crimes.
“This is a definitive statement from experts in the field of genocide studies that what is going on on the ground in Gaza is genocide,” the association’s president, Melanie O’Brien, a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia who specializes in genocide, told Reuters.
Sergey Vasiliev, a professor of international law at the Open University in the Netherlands who is not a member of the association, told Reuters the resolution showed that “this legal assessment has become mainstream within academia, particularly in the field of genocide studies.”
Several international rights groups and some Israeli NGOs have already accused Israel of committing genocide. Last week hundreds of UN staff at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk wrote to ask him to explicitly describe the Gaza war as an unfolding genocide, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.