Israeli military forces are likely to mount new attacks into parts of Gaza now crowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people once they have concluded their current offensive into Gaza City, a former Israeli national security adviser and general has said.
Yaakov Amidror, who served as national security adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu from 2011 to 2013 after decades in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), said that the "hardcore" of Hamas was in Gaza City but that "another chapter" could follow after the offensive there: an attack into the "central camps" area farther south.
"The campaign in Gaza City will be three months of intensive [fighting] then six months to clear it [of Hamas fighters] so there is no threat from there and then we decide about the central camps," Amidror said.
The "central camps" refers to the heavily built-up Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza. Both are packed with displaced Palestinians from elsewhere in Gaza and have been repeatedly subjected to airstrikes.
Aid officials working in Gaza told the Guardian that they had been "warned off" investing substantial resources in new facilities in the central camps area during recent discussions with Israeli military officials.
"Our clear understanding from those conversations was that the IDF would be going in there, though it wasn't clear if that meant now or after they're done in Gaza City," one said.
In August, Netanyahu referred in a press conference to the central camps as a secondary objective of the new offensive but gave no further details.
A new major offensive would exacerbate the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza further, reduce even more the fraction of the devastated territory that is available to Gaza's population and cause many more civilian casualties. Much of northern Gaza is gripped by famine, according to internationally respected experts, and malnutrition is widespread elsewhere.
The war was triggered by an attack by Hamas into Israel in October 2023 in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Of the 251 people taken hostage, 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 65,000 people, mostly civilians; injured more than 160,000; and reduced much of the territory to rubble.
More than 300,000 people have been displaced from Gaza City in the past month, according to figures from the UN, in the face of the new Israeli offensive, which started last week.
The Jordanian field hospital in the city's south-western neighbourhood of Tal al-Hawa received orders to evacuate on Monday morning, according to a senior health official.
The military has already ordered all Palestinians in Gaza City to head south, to central and southern Gaza. It has told aid workers in private messages that all humanitarian sites except hospitals must evacuate.
"The bombing is intense - from warplanes, tanks, and constant gunfire from drones," said Saja Al-Kharoubi, a 26-year-old resident of Gaza City's Al-Daraj neighbourhood.
"People are being forced to flee, but where can we go? We have no money, not even for transportation. The entire situation is dangerous everywhere."
Swathes of Gaza City, once a busy commercial and cultural hub, are now uninhabitable ruins. Until weeks ago, more than 1 million people were living there, many already displaced numerous times.
Netanyahu rejected the advice of Israel's most senior generals and intelligence officials not to launch the new offensive. Many Israeli observers and commentators accuse Netanyahu, who is facing corruption charges and is wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court, of seeking to fend off early elections, which could force his hard-right coalition from power, by prolonging the war.
The Israeli military, which says it wants to "destroy Hamas's military infrastructure", hasn't given a timeline for the operation in Gaza City. On Monday, the IDF said a rocket had been fired from Gaza City towards Israel.
"The military already dismantled Hamas as a military organisation long ago ... Israel destroyed most of Hamas's military capabilities and killed the overwhelming majority of its senior commanders last year," wrote Amos Harel,a respected military commentator,in Haaretz newspaper last week.
Yossi Kuperwasser,a former senior IDF intelligence officer now an analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security,said "the goal of the war"was to make sure Hamas and the entire region understood that [the 7 October attack] was "a huge mistake and they will never dream of doing anything like that again".