Israel Threatens to Destroy Gaza City Amid Trump’s Ceasefire Plan

The Israeli minister of military affairs has warned that Gaza City will be destroyed unless Palestinian resistance groups agree to an Israeli-backed ceasefire proposal by US President Donald Trump..

“A mighty hurricane will hit the skies of Gaza City today, and the roofs of the towers will shake,” Israel Katz wrote on X on Monday.

“Release the captives and lay down your weapons – or Gaza will be destroyed and you will be annihilated,” he wrote.

Residents said Israeli forces bombed Gaza City, the largest urban center in the besieged strip, from the air and blew up armored vehicles in its streets over the past hours.

Eyewitnesses said Israeli forces pounded several districts from the air and ground, destroying clusters of homes in the Sheikh Radwan, Zeitoun, and Tuffah neighborhoods.

Most of the deaths were from strikes on tents of the displaced people in Gaza City, where Israeli attacks also razed yet another high-rise building on Monday.

Among at least 40 Palestinians reported killed in Gaza on Monday was Osama Balousha, a journalist for Palestinian media.

Nearly 250 journalists have been killed in Gaza during the war, making it by far the world’s deadliest war for news media in living memory.

Israel launched a major assault last month on Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of residents are living in the ruins, having returned after the most intense fighting of the war’s early weeks nearly two years ago.

Meanwhile, the Hamas resistance movement said it was studying the latest US ceasefire proposal, delivered on Sunday, with a warning from Trump.

The US president on Sunday reiterated his demands for Hamas to release all of the remaining captives and threatened that this would be his “last warning.”

In a statement, Hamas confirmed that the movement welcomes any initiative that supports efforts to end the aggression against our people.

The renewed efforts to end the fighting come several weeks after Israel stonewalled a proposal for a temporary ceasefire presented by Qatar and Egypt.

The plan, which would have seen a 60-day pause in exchange for the release of around half of the remaining Israeli captives, was accepted by Hamas but received no response from the Israeli regime.

According to a senior Israeli official, the latest US proposal for Gaza calls for Hamas to return all 48 remaining living and dead captives on the first day of a ceasefire.

Hamas has long said it intended to hold onto at least some captives until negotiations were complete. It said in a statement it was committed to releasing all captives with a “clear announcement of an end to the war” and withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

Six more Palestinians, including two children, have died of malnutrition and starvation in Gaza in the past 24 hours, raising deaths from such causes to at least 393 people, most in the past two months.

The regime’s genocide in Gaza since October 2023 has so far killed over 64,500 people.