Yehya Qasem was having dinner with his family one evening in early October when the unmistakable sound of Israeli airstrikes pierced the air. The series of so-called firebelts were so deafening that his mom and siblings froze in fear, forsaking their meal of canned chickpeas.

Qasem peered out the window to see what was going on. His family worried that Israeli troops would enter their town of Jabalia that night. Trying to calm them down, he countered, “There’s nothing left for them to enter.”

Since Israel had launched its assault on Gaza a year earlier, the army had twice invaded Jabalia. “What’s left for them to destroy?” he recounted in a recent interview, an Israeli quadcopter’s strikes audible in the background.

Qasem’s family, it turns out, was right. That night marked the start of Israel’s scorched-earth assault on northern Gaza — the so-called General’s Plan to purportedly combat Hamas while clearing the area of its residents.

Tens of families immediately fled Jabalia. “People were running barefoot, with clear horrors on their faces,” Qasem, who is 28 years old, told The Intercept.

His family stayed put at first, but as the days passed and the bombing grew stronger, his disabled brother, mother, and sisters went to a relative’s house in Gaza City, nearly 3 miles to the south of their hometown. They had already lost one family member, Qasem’s twin brother, back in April. Yet Qasem chose to remain.

Since October 6, the Israeli army has paired its ground offensive with a nearly impenetrable siege and constant airstrikes — effectively starving the population while making it impossible for rescue teams and health care workers to do their jobs. While more than half of the area’s 200,000 remaining residents have fled since October, 65,000 to 75,000 people remain in the north, according to UNRWA.

“The implementation of the so-called General’s Plan, and all the Israeli army’s actions in northern Gaza, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said Yehya Muharab, an international law attorney. “These include grave violations of legal and humanitarian protections for civilians, hospitals, shelters, and vulnerable populations such as women and children.”

The Israeli military has killed at least 1,800 Palestinians in its ongoing assault on the north, said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense. On October 23, Basal said, an Israeli army drone played an audio message ordering rescue teams to evacuate the area — leaving an untold number of people trapped under the rubble or on streets that civil defense crews cannot reach.

“We were instructed to stop responding to appeals from residents, cease practicing our profession, and even refrain from driving our vehicles,” Basal said. The military directed the rescue workers to evacuate through the Indonesian Hospital, where soldiers arrested nine workers. After halting its rescue operations, the civil defense has “received a lot of appeals from residents blockaded in the north to send them food and water. It’s a very miserable disaster.”

The area’s two remaining hospitals — Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda — have meanwhile struggled amid Israeli bombings and the military’s refusal to allow the delivery of medical supplies and fuel.

“We don’t even have a single ambulance to transport the injured from disaster sites.”

“We don’t even have a single ambulance to transport the injured from disaster sites,” Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told The Intercept. He recounted getting distress calls from people trapped under the rubble and being unable to dispatch emergency workers to help them. “The next day, their........

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