Around 300,000 Palestinians from southern and northern Gaza are being forced to flee once again, the united nations says, when Israel issued new and expanded evacuation orders on Saturday. But many are unsure where to find safe haven in a war-torn place.
The expanded evacuation orders apply to the southernmost Gaza city of Rafah, where more than a million Gazans have gathered after fleeing Israeli bombing elsewhere over the past seven months. They have deepened fears that the Israeli military is willing to proceed with an invasion of Rafah that Israeli leaders have long promised, a prospect that international aid groups and many countries have condemned.
Some 150,000 people have already fled Rafah in the last six days, according to UNRWA, the United Nations agency that helps Palestinians.
“It is a very difficult situation: the number of displaced people is very high and none of them know where to go, but they leave and try to get as far as possible,” said Mohammad al-Masri, a 31-year-old man. An old accountant who takes refuge with his family in a tent in Rafah. “Fear, confusion, oppression and anxiety are eating away at people.”
Charles Michel, president of the European Council, criticized the extended evacuation order on Saturday on social networkssaying: “Orders to evacuate civilians trapped in Rafah to unsafe areas are unacceptable.”
Israel took control of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Monday in what it called a “limited operation,” and shelling and fighting in and around the city has continued since.
The Israeli military has said it is carrying out “targeted operations in specific areas of eastern Rafah” against Hamas. But the majority of the more than 34,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza were women and children, according to local health officials. Dozens of people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Rafah since Monday, health officials say.
Most of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been forced from their homes, often multiple times during the war, and many of them now live in ramshackle tents, classrooms or overcrowded apartments.
On Saturday, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “called on the population of additional areas in eastern Rafah to temporarily evacuate to the expanded humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi,” a coastal area north of Rafah.
“So far,” the army added, “approximately 300,000 Gazans have moved to the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone.”
Although Israel has characterized Al-Mawasi as a humanitarian zone, the United Nations has stressed that the area is neither safe nor equipped to receive the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already displaced by the war.
“Wherever you look now in the west #Rafa This morning, families are packing their bags,” UNRWA spokesperson Louise Wateridge wrote on social media on Saturday. “The streets are significantly emptier.”
Even as Israeli forces bombed Rafah, they have also repeatedly returned to areas of northern Gaza in recent weeks, including the town of Beit Hanoun and the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, to confront renewed militant activity. On Saturday, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the northern city of Jabaliya ahead of a planned operation.
Israel’s ground invasion began in late October in northern Gaza, in response to Hamas-led attacks on October 7 in southern Israel. Large swaths of the area were devastated by months of Israeli airstrikes and bombing, leaving a lawless wasteland dominated by street gangs. The Israeli military has said it killed many of Hamas’s key commanders in the area while driving out the group’s fighters.
Four Israeli soldiers were killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza on Friday, the army said. On Saturday, he said in a statement that Hamas was trying to “reassemble its infrastructure and terrorist operatives” around Jabaliya, which the Israeli military considers a Hamas stronghold and base of operations.
Fatma Edaama, 36, a resident of Jabaliya, said on Saturday that she hoped the latest fighting would be limited enough to allow her family to stay. “Our lives already ended in 2006,” when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, prompting Israel to begin tightening restrictions in Gaza, she said, adding: “There is nowhere safe for us to go.”
Israeli military analysts called the apparent resurgence of Hamas in northern Gaza a result of Israel’s failure to establish any alternative form of government there, leaving behind a vacuum that is an ideal breeding ground for an insurgency. Although Israeli forces raze areas, when they inevitably withdraw, Hamas reasserts its control, either directly or through allies, said Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli intelligence official.
“Hamas still rules,” Milshtein said. “His forces have been severely damaged, but they still have capabilities. There is still no alternative for them in Gaza, and all the alternatives we tried to establish failed.”
Earlier in the week, Razan al-Sa’eedi, an 18-year-old university student studying accounting, prepared with her family to leave the UNRWA school in Rafah, where they had been living for months. But as they waited for the driver they had hired to transport them to another city, they learned that her vehicle (a tractor pulling a large cart) had been hit by an Israeli missile, al-Sa’eedi said. One man died, she said.
Panicking, they called local emergency services, who told them no help was available. Instead, Ms. al-Sa’eedi said, family members left most of their belongings behind and set off on foot, each person carrying only a backpack.
As they waited outside the school entrance for Ms al-Sa’eedi’s father and brother, they saw them running with blood on their faces.
“We saw a drone shooting around him,” he said. “We grabbed our backpacks and ran away from that whole dangerous area.”
As they fled, Ms. al-Sa’eedi said, they occasionally stopped to try to flag down passing taxis, but time and again they found them full.
After a nearly two-day trek that involved hours of walking and then, finally, a taxi ride, he said, they arrived at Al Aqsa University in the southern city of Khan Younis. Inside a university building, classroom walls were scrawled with messages.
One message read: “This floor is reserved,” he said, while another said: “Please don’t take up any space otherwise we will kick you out.”
Only a small closet once used to store generators was empty. That would have to be enough.
“We only have three blankets to use as curtains,” said Mrs. al-Sa’eedi. “We have no alternative to this small room.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.