Israel's military has begun the next phase of the war — Operation Gideon's Chariots II.
Military analysts said it could be the most dangerous phase yet, as a depleted and exhausted army battles guerilla fighters in a dense urban environment.
But there are clues about how it could unfold, based on the ground invasion of another Gazan city, Rafah, in May last year.
Eli Cohen, a member of Israel's security cabinet, said the goal is to transform the strip's de facto capital into a wasteland.
"Gaza City should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins," he told right-wing television station, Channel 14, earlier this month.
Some fear it could be even more deadly and devastating — for the Palestinians who live there, the military personnel going in, and the hostages they are ostensibly trying to free.
Operation Gideon Chariots II
The Gaza City takeover is known as Gideon's Chariots II, after a previous operation of the same name that saw the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) take over 75 per cent of the Strip's territory.
The operation will mobilise around 130,000 troops, compared to just 50,000 at the peak of the Rafah ground invasion.
This includes an extra 60,000 reservists, the majority of which (around 40-50,000) will be ordered to show up for duty on September 2.
The second wave will be called up in November-December, and the third in February-March 2026.
The IDF is also extending the reserve duty for some 20,000 reservists who are currently serving by another 30-40 days.
But there is concern that many may refuse to serve, with turnout rates at record lows since the war began.
Resistance among the reserve forces has been growing, with thousands signing letters demanding the government stop the fighting and instead focus on reaching a deal to bring back the remaining hostages.
According to multiple media reports, even the Israeli military's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, has expressed concern about the exhaustion and fitness of reservists.
He feared such an offensive would risk the lives of the hostages and also reportedly urged the government to accept the current hostage deal on offer, saying "there is great danger to the lives of the hostages in taking over Gaza City".
Retired Brigadier General Amir Avivi from the Israeli Security and Defence Forum dismissed the tensions between General Zamir and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "fake news".
"The chief of staff and the prime minister know each other very, very well, and they both share a very clear understanding that Israel needs to win the war decisively and achieve all goals," he told the ABC.
"One important thing to understand about Israeli and Jewish culture is what we call in Hebrew 'chutzpah' — the tendency to speak our mind and not be deterred, and discuss and argue.
"So when people say, 'how can it be that the chief of staff is challenging the prime minister?' Yes, that's our culture."
If the operation goes ahead, the military personnel and reservists sent to Gaza City will also face great danger and a very different and complicated type of warfare than what's been seen so far.
The differences between this operation and Rafah
The Gaza City takeover will look very different from the Rafah ground invasion.
It will be urban guerilla warfare in dense terrain with booby traps and tunnel networks, with much of Hamas having been driven underground.
Gaza City is more heavily fortified and densely populated than Rafah, which was more open terrain.
That increases the complexity significantly and could also mean an increased duration.
The Gaza City takeover is reportedly estimated to need four to five months, and retired Brigadier General Amir Avivi said it will likely be slow.
"There are very elaborate tunnels that exist there, so the fighting will be a slow pace because you cannot just manoeuvre fast above ground," he told the ABC.
"You have to take over a small area and find the underground infrastructure and deal with it, and only then move forward to the next step."
Haaretz is reporting that there are also questions around the condition of the armoured vehicles that would be used, as Germany's arms embargo begins to be felt on the ground.
Brigadier General Avivi is confident the Israeli military will still significantly outgun Hamas.
"Hamas has been weakened dramatically, the morale is really, really low, and the IDF took out almost all the leadership of Hamas and [they] are recruiting 16-year-old kids," he said.
"It's obvious that once the IDF goes into Gaza City within a few weeks, Hamas will be destroyed."
In a statement to the ABC, the Hamas media office said the claims that Hamas was depleted and most of its leadership in Gaza City had been killed was a "propaganda tactic aimed at justifying further atrocities".
"These claims are neither independently verified nor credible, and they serve to mask the reality: Israel is deliberately targeting densely populated civilian areas, knowing full well that such actions will cause massive civilian casualties and deepen the humanitarian catastrophe," the office said.
Senior Israel-Palestine analyst for the National Crisis Group, Amjad Iraqi, said the Israeli military was relying largely on aerial power in Rafah, but in Gaza City, it would be much more complicated.
"The army is very fatigued and there's a fear that not a lot of reservists would actually show up to man this operation on the ground where they're going into an urban area where that kind of urban fighting and gun fighting is very likely," he told the ABC.
"The worst-case scenario is you're going to see Gaza City completely emptied of its population.
"A really destructive offensive that might include fighting on the ground with Hamas militants and, at the most extreme, the complete erasure of the Gaza Strip's de facto capital."
'The most dangerous phase yet'
The experience from Rafah also paints a dire picture of what the humanitarian impacts could be this time around.
Over a million people were forced to flee Rafah, some for the third or fourth time.
Their displacement caused extreme overcrowding in places like Al-Mawasi, where citizens were urged to flee, in particular, and triggered widespread famine warnings, disease outbreaks and trauma.
The offensive in Gaza City will begin with an evacuation warning for civilians.
Israeli officials have previously said the residents would have until October 7 to evacuate Gaza City, which coincides with the second anniversary of Hamas's attack on Israel.
The IDF reportedly estimates that 30 per cent will refuse to leave, possibly because of how hard it would be to move. Perhaps unsurprising, when you consider what evacuating would mean.
Displaced Palestinians like Hind Mohammed Abu Warda said evacuating would make no difference to their chance of survival.
"Even if we die, we won't go to the south [of Gaza]. The south is worse than here, there is no safety here or there … it is all the same," he told Reuters.
Gaza City is almost 30 kilometres away from Al-Mawasi, a journey that the majority of residents will have to make on foot, given fuel shortages and a lack of working vehicles.
Among the evacuations would be hundreds of patients at hospitals in Gaza City, where half of the remaining functioning hospitals are located.
Jerome Grimaud from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said this would be an extremely complicated operation.
"We have patients in very difficult conditions, the road is not good, the road is not safe, fuel is limited, so you can expect that some patients will be basically carried on donkey carts," he told the ABC.
Mr Iraqi said that on top of the famine that has already set in, these evacuations are likely to push many people over the edge.
"You might see a massive exponential rise in people dying, if not from the bombs, then from starvation," he told the ABC.
"When you're being forced to haul your body endless kilometres, when you're dealing with the stresses, the lack of food, no shelter, sweltering heat, thirst, this will undoubtedly be the most dangerous phase yet.
"And the deaths that will come afterwards are going to be really horrendous."
Where will Palestinians go?
Occupying just three per cent of Gaza's land area, the once fertile agricultural land of Al-Mawasi has been turned into a vast tent city home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans.
Population density is already among the highest in the world, with an estimated 48,000 people per square kilometre.
Residents have limited access to clean water, toilets, or waste disposal, heightening the risk of infections and disease.
There have been widespread outbreaks of lice, chickenpox and intestinal infections among children as a result.
Mr Grimaud from MSF said starvation and famine will likely mean the wounded also struggle to heal from their injuries.
"People who we are taking care of need almost twice as many calories as a normal person to heal," he said.
"And since they don't have access to that much food, it means their wounds don't heal, and they get infected again.
"And the flies come, and then you see worms in their wounds, so basically people see their limbs rot."
Overcrowding is not the only risk residents face. Al-Mawasi has also been repeatedly devastated by air strikes despite being labelled a "safe zone".
Residents have been forced to evacuate, but with nowhere else to go.
Mr Grimaud said the attacks on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis earlier this week show there are no safe zones in Gaza.
The National Crisis Group's Mr Iraqi said there was nothing humane about "humanitarian zones" like Mawasi.
"No such thing exists," he told the ABC.
"Since the beginning of the war, humanitarian zones were bombed, humanitarian zones were targeted, humanitarian zones did not get the aid they were supposed to get or were promised.
"And it's only gotten worse as time goes by. These zones have become traps, and to even think about them as humanitarian zones is totally misleading."
