Israel on Tuesday ordered a complete evacuation of Gaza City, home to around a million Palestinians, ahead of its controversial military takeover.

“To the residents of Gaza City and its neighborhoods, spanning from the Old City and Tuffah in the east to the coastline in the west: The IDF is committed to defeating Hamas and will operate with significant force in the Gaza City area, as it has across the Strip,” stated Avichay Adraee, the military’s Arabic spokesperson on Tuesday.

“For your safety, evacuate immediately via the Rashid axis toward the humanitarian zone in Al-Mawasi,” he added.

Leaflets with this message, featuring a map guiding residents from northern Gaza towards the western coast before heading south, were distributed throughout the northern parts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Palestinians to evacuate Gaza City on Monday, highlighting that “this is just the beginning of the intensified ground maneuver” in that area. The warning was issued shortly after the military increased airstrikes on the urban region.

Recently, Israel has been targeting high-rise buildings in the heavily populated city as it advances plans to control it, despite resistance from both domestic and international fronts.

The United Nations Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, has cautioned that an Israeli escalation in Gaza City could result in “more massive forced displacement, increased killings, unbearable suffering, senseless destruction, and atrocity crimes.”

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have also taken to the streets in protest against the planned takeover of the city, fearing that it could endanger any remaining hostages and pose risks to soldiers’ lives.

The Israeli military has expanded operations in recent weeks to seize Gaza City, which it says is key to defeating Hamas. It now claims control of about 40 per cent of the enclave’s largest city.

As of Wednesday, only 70,000 Palestinians – less than 10 per cent of Gaza’s City’s roughly one million residents – had evacuated, a senior Israeli official said, making up less than 10 per cent of the total population.

A source familiar with the matter told CNN earlier that Israel was planning to halt humanitarian airdrops over Gaza City and reduce the entry of aid trucks into the northern part of the strip, a move apparently designed to drive its residents to leave by depriving them of access to food.

Last month, COGAT, the Israeli agency that manages the flow of aid into Gaza, announced that it would be providing Palestinians in Gaza with tents before relocating them to the south of the enclave.

But only 3,000 tents have entered the entire territory so far, the senior Israeli official said on Tuesday, adding that the goal was to deliver 100,000 tents within three weeks. “We want to flood Gaza with tents,” the official said.

Meanwhile, the United States and Israel plan to expand the number of aid distribution sites run by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) from four to 16, an Israeli official told CNN last month.

None of these new sites would be in Gaza City, the official said. There is no indication yet that the new sites have all been established.

When plans for the takeover were announced, some Gaza City residents told CNN that they would rather die in their homes than be displaced again.

Um Samed, a 59-year-old mother of five, told Reuters that she had to make the decision whether “to stay and die at home in Gaza City, or follow (Israel’s) orders and leave Gaza and die in the south.”