The Israeli army is giving residents a narrow window to flee south, but its strikes continue in every corner of the enclave.
Thousands of Palestinians have left northern Gaza on foot, waving white flags and heading south in search of refuge that has become increasingly elusive as Israel bombards the entire enclave with airstrikes.
The United Nations said Wednesday that 15,000 Palestinians had fled northern Gaza the day before, using the main traffic artery, the Salah al-Din road. This is three times the figure estimated on Monday.
The Israeli army on Wednesday gave residents of northern Gaza a four-hour deadline to leave.
“It’s difficult to get information about an ongoing military operation, but people we speak to in Gaza say they see Israeli troops establishing positions and posts in nearby buildings,” Alan Fisher said. from Al Jazeera.
“At the same time, we see thousands of people moving south – not convoys of cars. They walk. They wave white flags, fearing attack. They are moving together in large groups – believing there might be some safety in numbers – on a desperate journey south toward a future they have no idea what holds for them,” reported Fisher.
He cited the Israeli military as saying there were about 100,000 people left in the northern Gaza Strip, down from a million previously.
“The Israeli army says that when it is in Gaza, it is all about ‘tightening the noose’ on Hamas, that it will target Hamas’s infrastructure and weapons installations. This is going to hit as hard as possible every Hamas fighter they find. »
Israel said its ground forces had surrounded Gaza City and were engaged in skirmishes with fighters from Palestinian groups. Palestinians say no corner of the Strip is safe from Israeli bombing. More than 70 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced.
The majority – including children, the elderly and people with disabilities – fled with minimal possessions. Some reported having to pass through Israeli checkpoints to reach southern areas and witnessing arrests by Israeli forces.
“The majority of people left their lands because the (Israeli) siege became absolute in Gaza. We have no water, no electricity, no flour,” Ameer Ghalban, pushing an elderly relative in a wheelchair on Gaza’s main road, told the Associated Press news agency.
“We were sitting peacefully when all of a sudden an F-16 airstrike landed on a house and blew it up, the whole block, three houses side by side,” said Mohammed Abu Daqa , witness to an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, told AP.
“Civilians, all civilians. An old woman, an old man and many others missing under the rubble.
More than 10,569 people have been killed in Israel’s relentless bombardment, including 4,324 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The war erupted on October 7 when Hamas launched attacks in southern Israel that authorities say killed more than 1,400 people.
The displacements in Gaza, where the majority of the population are refugees whose parents or grandparents were forcibly removed from their homes and barred from returning during the founding of Israel in 1948, have rekindled a painful sense of already seen.
“We can’t find any food and there is no flour. People are queuing to get water,” Umm Moamen al-Arja, a refugee mother in southern Gaza, told Al Jazeera.
“We just want to go home and be reunited with our families. »