Press Release: Veritas Press C.I.C.
Author: Kamran Faqir
Article Date Published: 16 Aug 2025 at 13:07 GMT
Category: Middle East | Palestine-Gaza | US-Israel At War
Source(s): Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies
On Day 680 of the Gaza war (August 16, 2025), the Israeli military issued forcible evacuation orders for Gaza City’s Zeitoun (Al-Zaytoun) neighbourhood, urging residents to leave immediately, part of a broader ground invasion operation. This comes as Israel accelerates preparations for further incursions into the Strip.
Simultaneously, resistance groups have released new videos, broadcast as “Day 680” updates, depicting local resistance alongside scenes of devastation in Al-Zaytoun.
Civil Defence In Gaza: Genocide In Al-Zaytoun.
The spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence, speaking to Al Jazeera, condemned the situation in Al-Zaytoun as genocide. He accused Israeli forces of deploying robots to detonate residential buildings, making it impossible for rescue teams to reach the injured. He said that Gaza City residents are now trapped with “nowhere left to flee,” depleted of all means of survival, describing the situation as “dire and catastrophic.” According to him, Israeli forces are systematically annihilating Gaza City, and Civil Defence lacks the capacity to protect civilians.
Homes Destroyed In Zaytoun Neighbourhood:
According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, approximately 400 homes in the Zaytoun neighbourhood have been destroyed by Israeli forces, including through the deployment of robots to demolish residential blocks.
Gaza’s Zaytoun Neighbourhood Faces Systematic Eradication (5th Consecutive Day):
For the fifth straight day, Israeli forces have intensified attacks on the densely populated Zaytoun neighbourhood, deploying sophisticated tactics, such as booby-trapped robots, fire belts, and explosive-laden demolitions, to systematically flatten entire residential blocks. Dozens of homes, including five-storey buildings, have collapsed, often without warning, burying families and causing mass casualties.
Eyewitnesses describe unrelenting shelling, air bombardment of Street 8, and destruction also spreading into adjacent Sabra (al-Sabra), prompting fears that continued assaults are part of a broader plan to depopulate Gaza City.
Many residents are fleeing west or central Gaza City; others remain trapped in areas too dangerous for ambulances or civil defence crews to reach. Bulldozers are levelling what remains of the razed buildings, leaving wastelands of rubble and desolation.
Civil defence officials, eyewitnesses, and human rights advocates, these actions typify a policy of collective punishment, gross violations of civilian rights, and, under international law, war crimes.
Three Days, 300+ Homes Destroyed, Blockade Deepens Catastrophe:
Over the past three days alone, more than 300 homes in Zaytoun have been destroyed, some multi-storey blocks, by Israeli forces using highly explosive ordnance. Rescue operations are blocked by a complete blockade of the neighbourhood, preventing emergency teams from accessing the wounded, thereby compounding the humanitarian catastrophe.
Broader Military Strategy: Reoccupying Gaza.
This brutal escalation is part of an overarching strategy by Israeli military command to fully reoccupy the Gaza Strip, beginning with Gaza City. Plans reportedly involve the forced displacement of around one million Palestinians to the south, followed by ground operations in residential areas and eventual encroachments on refugee camps in the centre. It is estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 reservists could be mobilised for this multi-front operation.
Casualties Since October 7, 2023:
Since the war began, Gaza’s Health Ministry and international sources report:
- Over 100,000 deaths and approximately 377,000 injuries.
- Tragically, 239+ have died from famine or malnutrition, including 106+ children
- Aid delivery remains severely constrained; only 14% of the required humanitarian aid has entered Gaza in recent weeks, fuelling mass starvation.
- Italy has conducted a major medical evacuation, transporting 31 children and 83 relatives to specialised treatment centres in Milan, Pisa, and Rome, bringing the total evacuated to over 180+ children and 580+ people.
International and Legal Context:
These forced evacuations, coupled with military actions targeting civilians and essential infrastructure, have drawn widespread international condemnation. Legal experts, rights organisations, and UN officials have labelled the evacuations as forcible displacement, potentially constituting war crimes and even genocide under international law.
In Summary: Zaytoun As A Policy For Annihilation.
What is unfolding in Al-Zaytoun is not merely the collateral wreckage of war but a deliberately engineered policy of eradication. The systematic use of explosive robots, fire belts, bulldozers, and siege tactics reveals a military doctrine designed not to disable armed groups but to strip Gaza City of its civilian life. Each destroyed home, each family entombed in rubble, and each evacuation order delivered under fire points to a calculated strategy of forced depopulation masquerading as security policy.
The patterns are chillingly familiar. Grozny in the 1990s, razed by Russian bombardment, was described by the UN as “the most destroyed city on Earth.” Aleppo during Syria’s war was systematically bombarded into submission, its hospitals and bakeries intentionally targeted. And long before, in 1944, the Nazis deliberately demolished Warsaw after crushing the uprising, reducing the Polish capital to rubble in an act meant not just to punish resistance but to obliterate a people’s claim to their city.
Zaytoun is now being subjected to the same logic of erasure through the architecture of destruction. Gaza’s Civil Defence calls it genocide, and the evidence supports the charge: neighbourhoods targeted not for military necessity but for annihilation; civilians displaced en masse; rescue crews blocked; basic means of life systematically dismantled.
The broader Israeli plan is now unmistakable: the forced transfer of one million Palestinians southward, while Gaza City is carved into “buffer zones” of lifeless ruins. This is not a defensive operation but a campaign of demographic engineering through mass violence. International law defines such acts clearly as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and potentially genocide.
Yet, just as Grozny, Aleppo, and Warsaw became emblems of unchecked brutality in their eras, Zaytoun risks becoming the twenty-first century’s most searing symbol of urban extermination under impunity. Each day that passes without accountability cements a precedent: that a modern state can raze entire districts, starve children, and forcibly uproot populations while the world debates terminology.
Unless international institutions act to halt this trajectory and hold perpetrators accountable, the fate of Zaytoun will not remain contained; it will stand as the blueprint for Gaza’s annihilation and a dark precedent for future wars of extermination against civilian populations.
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