Palestinians scramble to flee northern Gaza as Israel renews evacuation calls

October 14, 2023
MediaIntel.Asia

Palestinians flee from northern Gaza to the south after the Israeli army issued an evacuation warning. Photograph: Hatem Moussa/AP/PA
Palestinians are scrambling to flee northern Gaza after Israel ordered nearly half the population to flee south and carried out limited ground forays ahead of an expected land offensive, as the war appeared set to escalate a week after a wide-ranging Hamas attack on Israel.
Israel renewed calls on social media and in leaflets dropped from the air for some one million residents to move south, while Hamas urged people to stay in their homes.
Israeli air strikes on convoys fleeing Gaza City killed 70 people, mostly women and children, according to Hamas. It said the cars had been struck in three places as they headed south from Gaza City on Friday.
The United Nations (UN) and aid groups have said such a rapid exodus would cause untold human suffering, with hospital patients and others unable to relocate.
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Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with their possessions crowded a main road heading southwards from Gaza City as Israeli air strikes continued to hammer the besieged territory.
Gaza residents began moving south following Israel’s call to move the entire population in the northern part of the Strip to southern areas. (Reuters)
The Israeli military, which has not commented on the strikes, posted a message in Arabic on social media saying Palestinians could travel along two main routes without being harmed from 10am to 4pm local time.
The military said on Saturday that “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians had already streamed south.
Egyptian officials said Egypt, Israel and the United States have agreed to allow foreigners in Gaza to pass through the Rafah crossing point later on Saturday.
One official said both Israel and Palestinian militant groups had agreed to facilitate their exit, and that talks were still under way about bringing in aid.
Thousands of people who fled their homes crammed into a UN-run school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah, a city south of the evacuation zone. Many slept outside on the ground without mattresses, or in chairs pulled from the classrooms.
“I came here with my children. We slept on the ground. We don’t have a mattress, or clothes,” said Howeida al-Zaaneen (63) who is from the northern town of Beit Hanoun. “I want to go back to my home, even if it is destroyed.”
The Israeli military said its troops conducted temporary raids into Gaza to battle militants and hunted for traces of some 150 people – including men, women and children – abducted in the assault on southern Israel by Hamas on October 7th.
The mass evacuation order applies to all of Gaza City, home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel’s military said it planned to target underground Hamas hideouts, but Palestinians and some Egyptian officials fear Israel’s ultimate aim is to push Gaza’s people out through the southern border with Egypt.
The UN called on Israel to reverse the unprecedented directive, while Hamas told people to ignore the evacuation order.
Families in Gaza faced an agonising dilemma in deciding whether to leave or stay, with no safe ground anywhere.
A Palestinian man inspects the damage to a building after Israeli strikes in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty
Israeli strikes have levelled entire city blocks, and Gaza has been sealed off from food, water and medical supplies – all under a virtual total power blackout.
Haifa Khamis al-Shurafa (42) fled to the farming town of Deir al-Balah in a group of about 150 people on Friday, after her apartment in a neighbourhood of Gaza City was demolished in an Israeli air strike earlier in the week.
“We lost everything, our house, our belongings, everything,” she said. “All we have is our kids, and that’s why we left. We don’t want to lose them.”
The Gaza health ministry said on Saturday that 2,215 people have been killed in the territory, including 724 children and 458 women. The Hamas assault killed more than 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians, and about 1,500 Hamas militants were killed during the fighting, the Israeli government said.
Israel’s raids into Gaza on Friday were the first indication that troops had entered the territory since Israel began its round-the-clock bombardment in retaliation for the Hamas massacre. Palestinian militants have fired thousands of rockets into Israel since the fighting erupted.
A military spokesman said Israeli ground troops left after conducting the raids.
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Israel has called up some 360,000 reserves and massed troops and tanks along the border, but no decision has been announced on whether to launch a ground offensive. An assault into densely populated Gaza would likely bring even higher casualties on both sides in brutal house-to-house fighting.
“We will destroy Hamas,” Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Friday night.
Hamas said Israel’s air strikes killed 13 hostages, including foreigners, without giving their nationalities. The military denied the claim. Hamas and other Palestinian militants hope to trade the hostages for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
In Israel, the public remained in shock over the Hamas rampage and frightened by continual rocket fire out of Gaza.
In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry reported 16 Palestinians were killed on Friday, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed there to 51. The UN says attacks by Israeli settlers have surged there since the Hamas assault.
The UN said the Israeli military’s call for civilians to move south affects 1.1 million people.
If carried out, that would mean the territory’s entire population would have to cram into the southern half of the 40km strip. And Israel is still carrying out strikes across the territory, including in the south.
An Israeli spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, said the military would take “extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians” and that residents would be allowed to return when the war is over.
Israel has long accused Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said Israel wanted to separate Hamas militants from the civilian population.
“So those who want to save their life, please go south,” he said at a news conference with US defence secretary Lloyd Austin.
The US and Israel’s other allies have pledged ironclad support for its war on Hamas, but the European Union’s foreign policy chief said on Saturday that the military needs to give more time for people to evacuate northern Gaza ahead of any military action.
Josep Borrell, speaking to news media on a visit to China, welcomed the evacuation order but said “you cannot move such a volume of people in [a] short period of time”, noting a lack of shelters or transportation.
The UN estimated that tens of thousands had fled homes in the north by Friday night.
Gaza’s health ministry said it was impossible to safely transport the wounded from hospitals, which are already struggling with high numbers of dead and injured.
Al Awda Hospital struggled to evacuate dozens of patients and staff after the military contacted it and told it to do so by Friday night, said the aid group Médecins sans frontières, which supports the facility. The military extended the deadline to Saturday morning, it said.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as the UNRWA, said it would not evacuate its schools, where hundreds of thousands have taken shelter. But it relocated its headquarters to southern Gaza, according to spokeswoman Juliette Touma.
“The scale and speed of the unfolding humanitarian crisis is bone-chilling. Gaza is fast becoming a hellhole and is on the brink of collapse,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA’s commissioner general. – AP

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