Thousands Flee in Gaza as Israel Orders More Evacuations

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Palestinians displaced by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip queue for water at a makeshift tent camp in the southern town of Khan Younis, 

Israel issued a new round of evacuation orders for a large swath of the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sending thousands of Palestinians fleeing once again for relative safety.

In recent weeks, Israeli officials have spoken of moving toward narrower, more targeted attacks, but the exodus taking place in the city of Khan Younis made it clear Tuesday that for Palestinians, a return to ordinary life is not close.

Palestinians who had already been forced to flee again and again were once more on the move, hauling piles of their belongings on cars, trucks and donkey carts. Hospital patients were pushed in wheelchairs alongside others who fled on foot.

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“How long can we keep being ordered, ‘Leave and come back, leave and come back’?” wondered one Palestinian, Suzan Abu Daqqa, 59, after fleeing her home southeast of Khan Younis.

The trigger for the evacuation orders appeared to be a barrage of roughly 20 rockets that the Israeli military said had been fired from Khan Younis by Palestinian militants a day earlier. Israeli forces struck back overnight after “enabling civilians to evacuate from the area,” the military said.

The United Nations estimated that some 250,000 people will have to flee large areas of southern Gaza to comply with the new orders. Scott Anderson, a senior U.N. official, said the calculation was based on prewar population data and anecdotal observations of how many people had returned to the area.

The pattern of repeated civilian displacement is likely to continue even as the Israeli military speaks of a “lower-intensity” war, military analysts say. As militants regroup, Israeli forces have been returning to areas from which they had once withdrawn to wage days-long crackdowns.

For many Palestinians, these new operations are far from low-intensity.

The fighting has been pitched, for example, in northern cities like Shajaiye, Jabalia and Zeitoun. In Jabalia, more than 60,000 people fled their homes, according to the United Nations, returning to find widespread devastation.

On Tuesday, the United Nation’s top coordinator for humanitarian aid for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, said that the vast majority of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people had been displaced over the course of the war — many of them multiple times. She put the figure at 1.9 million people.

Israeli forces largely withdrew from Khan Younis in April after months of fighting, as they were gearing up to invade Rafah farther south. In the relative calm of that withdrawal, Abu Daqqa returned.

When she arrived at her house on the southern outskirts of the city last month, she found it relatively unscathed by the heavy Israeli bombardment that had destroyed large parts of Khan Younis. It even had running water.

But Monday evening, Abu Daqqa and her family heard that the Israeli military had yet again ordered an evacuation of the city. The all-too-familiar sound of artillery fire began, she said, prompting her to flee northwest with relatives.

Her family joined thousands of people who filled the streets of the demolished city Monday night as they headed toward the Muwasi area near the coast, which Israel has designated as a “safer zone.”

On Tuesday, Khan Younis residents said most of the explosions they could hear appeared to be farther south, in Rafah. But they worried that the wide-scale evacuation order might herald a renewed military operation in their own city, too.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Monday that the military would continue to operate in Gaza after the Rafah offensive ends to prevent Hamas from reclaiming control. The invasion began in October after Hamas led a bloody cross-border attack on Israel that the government says left about 1,200 dead and 250 taken hostage.

Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, said Israeli troops would seek to whittle away at Hamas’ remaining fighters, a process he said could take years. Over time, Israel hopes to erode Hamas’ forces so thoroughly that Gaza will take fewer and fewer forces to control, he said.

“Every time the terrorists manage to constitute themselves, there will be a raid to deal with them,” said Avivi, who leads the hawkish Israel Defense and Security Forum. “These raids can last a few days or a week at a time — generally no more than a few days — and then you withdraw.”

Hundreds of thousands of people have flooded into Khan Younis and central Gaza since Israel began its Rafah operation, creating tent cities in which finding enough food and clean water is often a daily struggle. The humanitarian crisis has increased international pressure on Israel.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military said it had laid a power line to a desalination plant in Khan Younis to bolster its output. A senior Israeli military official said that the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority would pay for the electricity and that UNICEF, the U.N. agency, would manage the plant.

Amid the panic stirred up by the newest evacuation order in Khan Younis, the European Hospital there ferried the majority of its medical staff and roughly 600 patients by ambulance to hospitals deeper into the city. Many of the doctors and patients there, scared by what they had seen in Israeli raids on other hospitals, were unwilling to take the risk of staying, said Dr. Saleh al-Homs.

He left the facility overnight, only to learn Tuesday morning that the Israeli military was saying there had been “no intention to evacuate the European Hospital.”

“Why did they wait until the hospital was evacuated to issue that statement telling us not to evacuate?” asked al-Homs. “People were terrified and desperate to get out.”

Jamal Azzam, a nurse at the hospital, said he had received phone calls from the Israeli military directing the staff to evacuate.

Four premature babies were sent by ambulance to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Azzam said. Many families who were sheltering around the hospital in tents had also fled, he said.

“This is torture,” Azzam said.

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Palestinians flee Gaza's second-largest city as Hezbollah demands ceasefire

An Israeli military order for people to leave the eastern half of Khan Younis — the Gaza Strip's second-largest city — has triggered the third mass flight of Palestinians in as many months, throwing the population deeper into confusion, chaos and misery as they scramble once again to find safety.

According to the United Nations, about 250,000 people live in the area covered by the order. Many of them had just returned to their homes there after fleeing Israel's invasion of Khan Younis earlier this year, while others had just taken refuge there after escaping Israel's offensive in the city of Rafah, further south.

The order has also prompted a frantic evacuation at European General Hospital, Gaza's second-largest medical facility.

The hospital shut down after staffers and more than 200 patients were evacuated overnight and on Tuesday, along with thousands of displaced who had sheltered on the hospital grounds, according to both staff and the Red Cross, which had a medical team there.

Hisham Mhanna, the organisation's spokesperson in Gaza, said some families dragged patients in their hospital beds through the streets for up to 10 kilometres to reach safety. Ambulances moved others elsewhere as staff rushed out valuable equipment.

Hours after ordering the evacuation, the Israeli military said the hospital was not in fact included in that order. But the staff said they feared a repeat of previous Israeli raids on other Gaza hospitals.

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Palestinians flee Khan Younis neighborhoods following an evacuation order issued by the Israeli army, Monday July 1, 2024.
Palestinians flee Khan Younis neighborhoods following an evacuation order issued by the Israeli army, Monday July 1, 2024. - AP Photo

"Many hospitals have come to rubble and have been turned into battlefields or graveyards," Mhanna said.

Israel has previously raided hospitals, saying Hamas uses them for military purposes — a claim Gaza's medical officials deny.

On Tuesday, cars loaded with personal belongings streamed out of eastern Khan Younis, though the number of those fleeing was not immediately known. The new exodus comes on top of the 1 million people who fled Rafah since May, as well as tens of thousands who were displaced the past week from a new Israeli offensive in the Shijaiyah district of northern Gaza.

Flight from Khan Younis

Monday's evacuation order suggested a new ground assault into Khan Younis could be coming though there was no immediate sign of one. Israeli forces waged a months-long offensive there earlier this year, battling Hamas militants and leaving large swaths of the southern city destroyed or heavily damaged.

Israel has repeatedly moved back into parts of the Gaza Strip it previously invaded to root out militants it said had regrouped — a sign of Hamas' continued capabilities even after nearly nine months of war in Gaza.

The Israeli military said Tuesday it estimates that some 1.8 million Palestinians are now in the humanitarian zone it declared, covering a stretch of about 14 kilometres along Gaza's Mediterranean coast.

Much of that area is now blanketed with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities with limited access to aid, UN and humanitarian groups say. Families live amid mountains of trash and streams of water contaminated by sewage.

The amount of food and other supplies getting into Gaza has plunged since the Rafah offensive began. The UN says fighting, Israeli military restrictions and general chaos — including looting of trucks by criminal gangs in Gaza — make it near impossible for it to pick up truckloads of goods that Israel has let in. As a result, cargo is stacked up uncollected just inside Gaza at the main Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, near Rafah.

The Norwegian Refugee Council said last week that in a survey of some 1,100 families who fled Rafah, 83% reported having no access to food while more than half had no access to safe water.

Hezbollah leader insists on Gaza ceasefire

The deputy leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said Tuesday the only sure path to a ceasefire on the Lebanon-Israel border is a full ceasefire in Gaza.

“If there is a ceasefire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said in an interview with The Associated Press in Beirut's southern suburbs.

Hezbollah's participation in the Israel-Hamas war has been as a “support front” for its ally, Hamas, Kassem said, and “if the war stops, this military support will no longer exist.”

However, he also said that if Israel scales back its military operations without a formal ceasefire agreement and full withdrawal from Gaza, the implications for the Lebanon-Israel border conflict are less clear.

“If what happens in Gaza is a mix between ceasefire and no ceasefire, war and no war, we can’t answer (how we would react) now, because we don’t know its shape, its results, its impacts,” Kassem said during an interview.

Talks to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza have faltered in recent weeks, raising fears of an escalation on the Lebanon-Israel front. Hezbollah has traded near-daily strikes with Israeli forces along their shared border over the past nine months.

Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem.
Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem. - AP Photo/Bilal Hussein

The low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border. In northern Israel, 16 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed; in Lebanon, more than 450 people — mostly fighters but also dozens of civilians — have been killed

Hamas has demanded an end to the war in Gaza, and not just a pause in fighting, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to make such a commitment until Israel realizes its goals of destroying Hamas’ military and governing capabilities and brings home the roughly 120 hostages still held by Hamas.

Last month, the Israeli army said it had “approved and validated” plans for an offensive in Lebanon if no diplomatic solution was reached to the ongoing clashes. Any decision to launch such an operation would have to come from the country’s political leadership.

Some Israeli officials have said they are seeking a diplomatic solution to the standoff and hope to avoid war. At the same time, they have warned that the scenes of destruction seen in Gaza will be repeated in Lebanon if war breaks out.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, is far more powerful than Hamas, and is believed to have a vast arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of striking anywhere in Israel.

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