The Israeli army on Saturday issued evacuation orders and targeted high-rise buildings in Gaza City, urging Palestinians to flee south ahead of an escalating offensive to seize the city of nearly 1 million.
Aid groups warned that a large-scale evacuation would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza City, which the world’s leading hunger watchdog announced last month was officially suffering from famine as a result of Israeli restrictions on food aid.
Most Palestinian families have been repeatedly displaced in the nearly two-year-long war and say they have nowhere left to go.
Photo: AFP
The Israeli military has previously bombed tent encampments designated as humanitarian zones.
“There is no safe tent, no safe house, no safe place, no safety at all,” said Nadia Marouf, who fled Israel’s offensive in the north with her children and resettled in Gaza City — only to see her tent destroyed on Saturday in an Israeli airstrike that wiped out a 15-story building and surrounding encampment.
“Where do I go? We went to the south, there is no space in the south, where can we go?” she asked.
Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee called on Palestinians to flee to southern Gaza, announcing on social media that the Israeli army had redrawn the borders of a humanitarian zone to encompass the overcrowded encampment of Muwasi and parts of the southern city of Khan Younis.
Aid groups have raised alarm about woefully inadequate shelter, sanitation, water and food in Muwasi.
Months of Israeli bombardment have decimated civilian infrastructure in Khan Younis.
The Israeli military said it would work to provide field hospitals, water pipelines and food supplies within its humanitarian zone.
Hamas urged Palestinians to stay put in defiance of the latest evacuation orders.
Exhausted and despairing, many Palestinians had their own reasons for refusing to pack up and uproot themselves again.
“I can’t walk, I am in pain, and I do not know what to do or where to go,” said Ala Alfarani, whose tent was crushed beneath a pile of rubble in Israel’s strike on a high-rise in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of south Gaza City.
Israel on Saturday issued evacuation warnings for two high-rises in Gaza City, with Adraee accusing Hamas of operating inside or near the towers.
Soon after, Adraee said that the military had struck one of them.
Hamas rejected the allegations, insisting the high-rises were residential towers.
Residents of Sousi Tower, a prominent 15-story building, said that the Israeli army gave them about 20 minutes to grab their belongings and flee before warplanes razed the building.
“We were sitting at home and people started shouting,” resident Aida Abu Kas said. “Some said it was a lie and other said it was real. We went out and didn’t know what to do.”
It was not immediately clear if people had been killed or wounded in the strike.
Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz posted a video of the Sousi Tower collapsing in an enormous cloud of smoke along with the words: “We continue.”
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