Israel’s growing air and ground offensive in southern Gaza has displaced tens of thousands of additional Palestinians and worsened the territory’s already dire humanitarian conditions, with fighting preventing the distribution of food, water and medicine in outside part of southern Gaza and new military evacuation orders pressing on the population. in increasingly smaller areas of the south.
As the ground offensive focuses on the Gaza Strip and the second-largest city of Khan Younis, it further narrows the area where Palestinians can seek safety and pushes large numbers of people, many of whom have been forced to flee several times. several times, towards the sealed border with Egypt.
While Israeli forces have ordered residents to evacuate Khan Younis, much of the town’s population remains behind, along with large numbers of people displaced from northern Gaza who are unable or reluctant to leave. flee to the disastrously overpopulated far south.
According to the United Nations, some 1.87 million people, or more than 80 percent of the population of 2.3 million, have already fled their homes. Almost the entire population is now concentrated in southern and central Gaza, dependent on aid.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that law and order in Gaza could soon collapse due to the complete collapse of the humanitarian system.
“The situation is rapidly deteriorating and turning into a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians as a whole and for peace and security in the region. Such an outcome must be avoided at all costs.”
Bushra Khalidi, a Ramallah-based legal expert and rights campaigner with the international charity Oxfam, warned that Israel’s efforts to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to a small area in the south make it impossible to deliver aid and increase the risk of disease.
“Locking people into a space that is basically as big as London’s Heathrow Airport… is inhumane and makes it impossible to distribute aid to people,” Khalidi told Tel Aviv Tribune. “Gaza was already overcrowded… (now) we’re talking about 1.8 million people in an airport. »
Khalidi added that cholera and gastroenteritis are spreading rapidly due to congested conditions.
The Israeli offensive has killed at least 16,248 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. In Israel, the official death toll stands at around 1,200.