The Israeli regime has ordered the residents of Gaza City to evacuate the area within 24 hours, in what is viewed as a precursor of a ground invasion by the occupying entity after suffering a serious setback by the Palestinian resistance groups over the past few days.
In a statement released on Friday, Israel’s military called on all people living north of the Gaza Strip, which amount to more than one million, to relocate south within 24 hours as the regime deploys tanks and heavy armaments near the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military claimed it would operate “significantly” in Gaza City in the coming days and civilians would only be able to return when another announcement was made.
“Now is a time for war,” said Israel’s minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant as the regime’s warplanes continue pounding Gaza for the seventh consecutive day in relentless attacks that have claimed the lives of at least 1,500 Palestinians, including some 500 children and 280 women.
The inhumane attacks have already displaced more than 420,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations.
‘Devastating humanitarian consequences’
The United Nations said it considered it impossible for such a movement of people to take place “without devastating humanitarian consequences.”
The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said it relocated its central operations center and international staff to Gaza’s south to continue its humanitarian operations and support its staff and Palestinian refugees.
Hamas said the Gaza relocation warning was “fake propaganda” and urged citizens not to fall for it, also calling on Palestinians to rise up on Friday and march to the al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied Old City of al-Quds in protest at Israel’s bombardment of the coastal area since the retaliatory strikes by the resistance groups at the weekend.
Israel started its onslaught on Saturday after Hamas-led resistance groups launched multi-pronged Operation al-Aqsa Storm, the largest military operation against the occupying regime in decades.
Since then, the resistance groups have fired more than 5,000 rockets in retaliatory strikes at the occupied territories, leaving more than 1,300 settlers and troops dead and three times as many injured.
The Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million people, is under years-long siege by the Israeli regime.
Palestinian population in Gaza being ‘wiped off’
Reacting to the ongoing Israeli onslaught, the UN rapporteur for Palestine said a significant part of Gaza’s population is being “wiped off,” as the blockaded city continues to face intense Israeli strikes and shelling.
“What’s happening is that a significant part of the Palestinian population in Gaza is being wiped off. Not differently from what has happened before in … but with increased ferocity,” Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said in press statements on Thursday.
Albanese also commented on a decision by Israel earlier this week to cut off Gaza’s supply of water, electricity, food, and other basic facilities, underlining that starving a besieged population and depriving them of essentials was a war crime.
“If it’s intentional and, in the context of a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population, it also constitutes a crime against humanity,” she added.
Albanese highlighted the overwhelmed state of hospitals in Gaza still functioning under the Israeli bombardment, saying that they had reached maximum capacity.
“There are patients sharing the same bed, patients lying on the ground, and there are no medicines,” she said, adding that there is “no possibility of anything entering Gaza,” as the area is “under total siege.”
Describing the situation as catastrophic, she said there were people on the ground in the city, running with dead or wounded in their arms, trying to find shelter, of which there is none in the city.
“Every rule of international humanitarian law had been broken” throughout the Israeli aggression, Albanese underlined.
‘Nobody wants to live in Sinai tents’
Palestinians in Gaza have called on Egyptian authorities to use the Rafah crossing to allow essential aid and resources to flow into Gaza, particularly after electricity and water were cut by Israeli authorities on Monday.
The Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza – the only gateway in and out of the besieged area – was targeted by three separate Israeli strikes earlier this week.
“Hospitals are in a very, very bad situation. Electricity and water plants in Gaza [have] stopped,” said Omar Shaban, a Gaza-based analyst and founder of PalThink for Strategic Studies.
The calls by Palestinians were just limited to the delivery of humanitarian aids as they had rejected to move to Egypt and a buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula after the Israeli regime had floated the idea of constructing illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip following a potential ground invasion.
“Palestinians are aware of this idea of some Israelis, to push Gaza into Sinai. They will not do it, they will not accept it,” said Shaban, stressing that the idea was raised during previous Israeli wars on Gaza and yet “people did not leave Gaza to Sinai.”
“They are not stupid. They don’t want to repeat the second Nakba,” Shaban added, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of the illegal entity in 1948.
Muhammad Shehada, a journalist and rights activist from Gaza, stressed that people in Gaza have no desire to leave despite the Israeli blockade and living through five brutal wars since 2008.
“Nobody in Gaza wants to live as a refugee in tents in the Sinai Desert,” he said. “That’s basically the plan of the Israeli far-right.”
