by When Samir Hassan and his surviving relatives fled their home in the central Gaza Strip town of Mughraqa weeks ago, they did so under intense Israeli airstrikes, which killed several family members, including an uncle, and seriously injured his brother.
They settled in a tent in the nearby Nuseirat area, where tens of thousands of Palestinians forced by Israel’s air and ground offensive had also fled and found whatever refuge they could in overcrowded schools, dilapidated tents or even in the streets.
Mr Hassan’s family have now been warned they must move again.
This week, the Israeli army ordered more than 150,000 people to leave parts of central Gaza. “The area in which it is located is considered a zone of deadly combat,” he warned. brochures that were thrown on houses, shelters and camps.
“God willing, this will be the last time we are displaced,” said Hassan, 22, a taxi driver. The family lost everything the first time he fled, he said.
Israel’s war against Hamas has forced many of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians to repeatedly flee for their lives as airstrikes bomb their towns and cities and Israeli forces advance their ground invasion.
The now-threatened area, approximately nine square kilometers, has six shelters housing some 61,000 displaced people, mostly from northern Gaza, according to the United Nations. This is in addition to the area’s original 90,000 residents.
In its latest evacuation orders, Israel ordered people to immediately move to shelters that the UN says can barely accommodate the several hundred thousand people already there.
An estimated 1.9 million people in Gaza, or nearly 85 percent of the population, are displaced, according to the United Nations aid agency for the Palestinians.
“Forced to move again,” the agency said Thursday. “The Israeli authorities’ evacuation order from central Gaza causes continued forced displacement. “More than 150,000 people – young children, pregnant women, people with disabilities and the elderly – have nowhere to go.”
The only hope left for Gazans, the agency said, is a ceasefire.
Israel’s evacuation orders, which the United Nations says risk forced displacement, which is a war crime, have at times been contradictory and confusing. And even as Gazans make the heartbreaking decision to uproot their families once again, they are forced to make impossible choices, with no safe places to go.
The Israeli bombing and siege of Gaza have decimated much of the Palestinian enclave and its infrastructure, leaving millions of people hungry and exposed to the elements and creating a public health disaster in the making.
Israel has said it is addressing humanitarian concerns, including those expressed by the United States. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, said on social media that in an effort to help Gazans understand evacuation directives, they had published maps divided into grids “to preserve their safety and security.”
But Israel has routinely used 2,000-pound bombs (one of the largest and most destructive supplied by the United States) in densely populated areas of southern Gaza, where civilians were asked to move for safety reasons, according to an analysis by the visual evidence made by The New Times of York.
At Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, a mother of five said she and 20 members of her family had arrived there the day before. It is the fourth time the family, including a 10-month-old baby, has been forced to flee since the war began.
“They threatened the entire block around us, even the new camp, even the market street; They threatened everything,” he said. “They threw pamphlets at us ordering us to leave within three days. “So we had to come here.”
Living in a thin tent in the cold of winter has made all of her children sick, she said. Now they live on the cold sidewalk in front of the hospital.
“We don’t have mattresses,” he said. “We only have blankets. “We either cover ourselves with them or sleep on them.”
