Palestinians living in the ruins of Gaza City were bombarded with Israeli leaflets yesterday ordering them out, after Israel said it was about to obliterate the area in an assault to wipe out Hamas, causing panic and confusion.
Residents of the city, the enclave’s biggest urban centre that was home to a million Palestinians before the war, have been expecting an onslaught for weeks, since the Israeli government devised a plan designed to deal Hamas a fatal blow in what it says are the group’s last strongholds.
“I say to the residents of Gaza, take this opportunity and listen to me carefully: you have been warned – get out of there!” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
The Israeli military airdropped leaflets with evacuation orders onto residents standing amid the rubble of Gaza City, where it has bombed residential towers to the ground in the past few days.
The evacuation orders rattled the city’s residents who say there is no safe place to go to escape bombardment and a humanitarian crisis.
Some said they would have no choice but to leave for the south, but many said they would stay and there were no immediate signs of a mass exodus.
Anxiety was spreading through a tent area in Gaza City housing displaced cancer patients.
“There’s no place left, not in the south, nor the north, nothing. We’ve become completely trapped,” said one of the patients, Bajess Al Khaldi, as people looked at the rubble of several buildings destroyed in an Israeli attack.
Displacement is a profound issue for Palestinians who fear that Netanyahu and his far-right allies in government want a repeat of the “Nakba”, or “catastrophe”, when hundreds of thousands of people fled or were driven out during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation.
Israel has been widely accused of genocide, including by the world’s biggest group of genocide scholars, over its nearly two-year campaign in the Palestinian enclave that has killed more than 64,000 people according to local authorities.
Israel rejects the accusation, citing its right to self-defence following the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people and resulted in the capture of 251 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
The health authorities in Gaza announced they would not evacuate Gaza City’s two main operational hospitals, Al Shifa and Al Ahli, adding that doctors would not leave patients unattended.
Most Gazans have already been displaced several times since the war started, much of the territory lies in ruins and a hunger crisis has grown far worse in recent months.
The Israeli military has instructed residents in Gaza City to move to a designated “humanitarian zone” in the already overcrowded Al Mawasi area along the coast in the south, where thousands of Palestinians have already been sheltering in tents. Israel has also regularly bombed the south.
Um Samed, a 59-year-old mother of five, said the choice now was whether “to stay and die at home in Gaza City, or follow Israel’s orders and leave Gaza and die in the south”.
The full-scale operation is not yet expected to start in the coming week, and no new advance by tanks to deepen the ground offensive was reported so far.
Israeli forces have been operating on Gaza City’s outskirts since last month, and the military said it was in control of 40 per cent of the city already.
International critics say Israel’s Gaza plan, which includes demilitarising the whole strip as Israel takes security control, could worsen the humanitarian plight of the 2.2 million Palestinians who live there.
The Gaza City assault plan has provoked concern inside Israel, where public support for the war has wavered.
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