Gaza is burning’: Israel launches ground invasion of strip’s largest city
Nearly two years into its retaliatory military offensive in the Gaza Strip, Israel said it has launched a long-studied ground assault on Gaza City.
“IDF troops have begun expanding ground operations in Gaza City as part of Operation Gideon’s Chariots II,” the Israeli Defense Forces said Tuesday on social media.
“Gaza is burning,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had said earlier in the day, in a separate Google-translated update. “We will not relent or turn back — until the mission is complete,” he added.
The ground invasion marks a deepening of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip, which once housed 2.2 million people and has devolved into a starvation-stricken battlefield. Gaza City, previously the enclave’s most populous urban settlement, is still home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian people.
Israel insists its campaign targets the demilitarization of Hamas and release of hostages taken by the Palestinian militant group after its terror attacks in October 2023.
Speaking to reporters as he prepared to leave Israel, visiting U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled that a ground invasion of Gaza City was imminent.
“Well, as you saw, the Israelis have begun to take operations there. So we think we have a very short window of time in which a deal could happen. We don’t have months anymore,” he said. “Our preference, our number one choice, is that this ends with a negotiated settlement with Hamas.”
CNBC has reached out to the IDF and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
International backlash
Israel’s military progress in Gaza has increasingly isolated the Jewish state on the international stage.
Several Western nations initially backed Israel’s right to self-defense and to pursue Hamas militarily after the Palestinian militant group’s terror attacks, but have since noted the perceived disproportionality of the Jewish state’s Gaza campaign and risk to civilians.
Nations including Norway, Spain and Ireland recognized Palestinian statehood in the spring of 2024, with France, Canada and Australia later announcing plans to take the same step this month. In a blow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration, a report by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Tuesday concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinian people in the Gaza enclave.
For both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the issues of ongoing deaths in Gaza and the potential Israeli annexation of the West Bank could imperil Trump’s ambitions to expand the Abraham Accords during his second term.
normalization of relations with Israel, but that could now be out of reach. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has signaled that this step would require a credible and irreversible pathway to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“While relations can keep on being resilient, they are taking a different nature – limited in scope, mostly under-the-radar, focusing on security interests, and without a meaningful public dimension,” Nimrod Goren, president and founder of Mitvim, told CNBC.
“Should the Israeli government decide to annex any part of Palestinian territories in the West Bank, following upcoming recognitions of a Palestinian state, then ties with Arab countries will suffer another blow and will further deteriorate. Israel should refrain from such a step, and the US should stop any such intentions,” he added.
