Palestinians who fled Gaza City after Israel’s evacuation order say snipers shot dead civilians near Yarmouk stadium.
Several civilians in Gaza City say people have been shot dead by snipers after the Israeli army issued a new evacuation order and told Palestinians to head south as it intensifies its offensive across the enclave.
The attacks reportedly came as civilians were evacuating a number of neighborhoods in Gaza City after being ordered to leave on Wednesday, even as mediators from Qatar, the United States and Egypt met with Israeli officials in Doha for ceasefire talks.
One man told Tel Aviv Tribune he was sitting near Yarmouk stadium when he saw an Israeli sniper shoot a man on a bicycle carrying canned goods. “The sniper shot him directly,” he said.
“We couldn’t move his body. Even the paramedics couldn’t get to the street. They couldn’t recover or evacuate this person’s body.”
The paramedics, who were forced to turn back, reportedly told the man that they had not received instructions to recover the bodies. They had been warned that anyone who approached the deceased would be shot.
One woman told Tel Aviv Tribune she wanted to walk through Yarmouk stadium but was told there were bodies of Palestinians in the streets who had been shot by Israeli snipers.
“We came to ask for help from the ambulance and firefighters to at least recover the bodies so they don’t stay on the street,” she explained. “They have to be buried.”
Several people reported seeing a man walking down the street being shot in the head by a sniper who was aiming at him from a tower. Several people later managed to recover his body.
“This man was walking quietly, and then he was shot in the head. We went down and brought him here,” one man said.
Reporting from the Shujayea neighborhood, where the Israeli military has stepped up its attacks in the past two weeks, Tel Aviv Tribune’s Ibrahim Al Khalili said Israeli forces left a trail of destruction after withdrawing from parts of the area.
“Many residents are in shock and struggling to comprehend the scale of the devastation,” he said, adding that there were many civilian casualties.
“Hospitals and clinics are overwhelmed by the number of injured, many of whom require urgent medical attention,” he said, and thousands of residents have been displaced.
The buildings still standing are structurally compromised with “significant damage to roofs, walls and foundations,” he said. Essential services such as water, electricity and sanitation have been “severely disrupted.”
The Israeli military has repeatedly ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return from areas it had previously declared safe, in both northern and southern Gaza.
On Wednesday, the army dropped leaflets addressed to “all residents of Gaza City,” urging residents to leave the “dangerous combat zone,” days after ordering the evacuation of the neighborhoods of Daraj, Tuffah and the Old City.
B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, called Israel’s order for the entire population of Gaza City to evacuate “absolute madness.”
In a social media post on Wednesday, he said the international community must now step in and “demand that Israel immediately stop the war.”
Talks on a ceasefire and an exchange of prisoners held in Gaza for Palestinians held in Israeli jails continued Thursday in the Qatari capital.
Tamer Qarmout, assistant professor of public policy at the Doha Institute for Advanced Studies, said he remained “quite pessimistic” about them after “previous rounds of negotiations failed miserably.”
He told Tel Aviv Tribune that the talks would be the last effort of US President Joe Biden’s administration, after which “the Americans will be busy with their elections and the Gaza war will be a secondary or third priority for them.”
