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More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced from Gaza City in the last month, according to figures from the UN, with tens of thousands more forced to flee makeshift homes and shelters daily in the face of a new Israeli offensive.
Multiple strikes by Israeli artillery, tanks and warplanes hit Gaza City again on Thursday as a UN official said “new waves of mass displacement” were under way, after about 60,000 fled the new assault in 72 hours earlier this week.
Israeli military officials say the total number following Israeli orders to evacuate Gaza City is much higher.
An unbroken column of traffic heavily laden with household utensils, blankets, mattresses, gas cylinders and often entire families packed Gaza’s narrow coastal road on Thursday as a steady stream of Palestinians headed south towards areas designated by Israel.
Prices for transport have soared, forcing some to walk, laden with belongings and young children. “We are heading to go sleep on the streets towards the beach, like this, barefoot … We don’t know where to go,” said Yasser Saleh, speaking as he stood on a rickety trailer being pulled by a car.
Israeli military officials said Gaza City was a “Hamas stronghold” and said as many as 450,000 civilians had left. The estimate was based on multiple sources, including drone surveillance, an official told the Guardian.
Israeli forces now control Gaza City’s eastern suburbs and in recent days have moved into the Sheikh Radwan and Tel al-Hawa areas, from where they would be positioned to advance on the central and western districts where most of the remaining population is sheltering.
Swathes of Gaza City, once a busy commercial and cultural hub, have been reduced to uninhabitable ruins. Until weeks ago, more than a million people were living there, many already displaced multiple times.
On Wednesday Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, described Gaza as a “real-estate bonanza”, according to local Hebrew media reports. Speaking to a property development conference in Tel Aviv, Smotrich said “the demolition, the first stage in [Gaza City’s] renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.”
The same day, the Israeli military announced the opening of a second route out of Gaza City – through the middle of the Gaza Strip – for two days to try to encourage the exodus. Its Arabic-language spokesperson, Col Avichay Adraee, said the corridor would remain open for just 48 hours.
Shadi Jawad, 47, who fled Gaza City via the route, said: “The situation is indescribable – crowds everywhere, the sound of explosions, women and men crying and screaming as they walked while carrying their belongings.”
The Israel military has been dropping leaflets urging residents to flee towards a designated “humanitarian zone” in the south of the territory, but aid agencies say conditions there are dire, with insufficient food, medicine and space and inadequate shelter.
Rosalia Bollen of Unicef said: “The area in southern Gaza that people are ordered to go to is a largely overcrowded stretch of dunes. It is inappropriate, unprepared and unsafe to host displaced families with immense humanitarian needs there. And for the hundreds of thousands of people still left in Gaza City – half of them children – we are deeply worried, as airstrikes have been pounding Gaza City,.”
Much of northern Gaza is gripped by famine, according to internationally respected experts.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, rejected the advice of Israel’s most senior generals and intelligence officials not to launch the offensive. Many Israeli observers and commentators accuse Netanyahu, who is facing corruption charges and is wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court, of seeking to fend off early elections, which could force his hard-right coalition from power, by prolonging the war.
Israel’s government has also been accused of aiming to make Gaza City uninhabitable to put pressure on Palestinians to leave and for other countries to receive them.
At least 79 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes or gunfire across Gaza in the past 24 hours, mostly in Gaza City, the territory’s health ministry said on Thursday.
The war was triggered by an attack by Hamas into Israel in October 2023 in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Of the 251 people taken hostage, 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 65,000 people, also mostly civilians, and injured more than 160,000.
On Tuesday, a UN commission of inquiry accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, saying Netanyahu and other senior officials had incited the crime. Israel rejected the findings as “distorted and false”.
On Thursday an attacker killed two men at the main border crossing between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan, Israeli medics and the military said. The Israeli national emergency service, the Magen David Adom, said security forces had “neutralised” the attacker, who reportedly arrived on a truck transporting humanitarian aid and was armed with a firearm and a knife.
