Israel-Hamas war: Israeli military orders civilians to evacuate Gaza City, ahead of feared ground offensive

Palestinians fleeing from northern Gaza to the south after the Israeli army issued an unprecedented evacuation warning to a population of over 1 million people to seek refuge in the south ahead of a possible Israeli ground invasion. Photo / AP

Palestinians fled in a mass exodus on Friday from northern Gaza after Israel’s military told some 1 million people to evacuate to the southern part of the besieged territory ahead of an expected ground invasion in retaliation for the surprise attack by the ruling Hamas militant group nearly a week ago.

The UN warned that ordering almost half the Gaza population to flee en masse would be calamitous, and it urged Israel to reverse the unprecedented directive. As airstrikes hammered the territory throughout the day, families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with possessions streamed down a main road out of Gaza City.

Hamas’ media office said warplanes struck cars fleeing south, killing more than 70 people. The Israeli military said its troops had conducted temporary raids into Gaza to battle militants and hunted for traces of some 150 people abducted in the Hamas attack.

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The Israeli military sent one evacuation order, warning the hundreds of thousands of civilians of Gaza City to flee deeper south into the Gaza Strip, a narrow coastal territory. Israel’s directive charged that Hamas militants were hiding in tunnels under the city.

“This evacuation is for your own safety,” the Israeli military said.

Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, dismissed the orders, calling on Palestinians to “remain steadfast in your homes and to stand firm in the face of this disgusting psychological war waged by the occupation”, according to a statement from its authority for refugee affairs.

The United Nations said it received a separate directive from the Israeli military shortly before midnight Thursday in New York, giving all 1.1 million civilians of northern Gaza 24 hours to flee south.

“This is chaos, no one understands what to do,” said Inas Hamdan, an officer at the UN Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza City, while she grabbed whatever she could throw into her bags as the panicked shouts of her relatives could be heard around her. She said all the UN staff in Gaza City and northern Gaza had been told to evacuate south to Rafah.

Unrelenting Israeli strikes over the past week have levelled large swaths of neighbourhoods, magnifying the suffering of Gaza, which has also been sealed off from food, water and medical supplies, and under a virtual total power blackout.

Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza City, said there was no way more than one million people could be safely moved that fast.

“Forget about food, forget about electricity, forget about fuel. The only concern now is just if you’re make it, if you’re going to live,” Farsakh said, breaking into heaving sobs.

“What will happen to our patients?” she asked. “We have wounded, we have elderly, we have children who are in hospitals,” Farsakh said many of the medics were refusing to evacuate hospitals and abandon patients. Instead, she said, they called their colleagues to say goodbye.

The flurry of directives was taken as signalling an already expected Israeli ground offensive, though the Israeli military has not yet confirmed such a decision. On Thursday it said that while it was preparing, no decision had been made.

Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said the military will operate with “significant force” in Gaza in the coming days and called on civilians to evacuate so it can strike Hamas militants. He said Israeli forces “will make extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians”.

“Out of an understanding that there are civilians here who are not our enemy and we do not want to target them, we are asking them to evacuate so that we will be able to continue to strike military targets belonging to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”

Palestinians search for bodies and survivors in the rubble of a residential building levelled in an Israeli airstrike. Photo / AP

In the week-old war, the Gaza Health Ministry said Friday that roughly 1900 people have been killed in the territory — more than half of them under the age of 18, or women. The Hamas assault last Saturday killed more than 1300 Israelis, most of whom were civilians, and roughly 1500 Hamas militants were killed during the fighting, the Israeli government said.

The UN said the broad evacuation warning it received also applies to UN staff and the hundreds of thousands who have taken shelter in UN schools and other facilities since Israel launched round-the-clock airstrikes on Sunday.

“The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

“The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation,” Dujarric said.

Another UN official said the United Nations is trying to get clarity from Israeli officials at the senior most political level.

“It’s completely unprecedented,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly.

A ground offensive in Gaza - which is ruled by Hamas and where the population is densely packed into a sliver of land only 40km long - would likely bring even higher casualties on both sides in brutal house-to-house fighting.

Hamas’ unprecedented assault last Saturday and smaller attacks since have killed more than 1300 people in Israel, including 247 soldiers — a toll unseen in Israel for decades — and the ensuing Israeli bombardment has killed more than 1530 people in Gaza, according to authorities on both sides. Israel says roughly 1500 Hamas militants were killed inside Israel, and that hundreds of the dead in Gaza are Hamas members. Thousands have been wounded on both sides.

As Israel pounds Gaza from the air, Hamas militants have fired thousands of rockets into Israel. Amid concerns that the fighting could spread in the region, Syrian state media reported that Israeli airstrikes put two Syrian international airports out of service.

An Israeli howitzer fires at the Gaza Strip from the south of Israel. Photo / AP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “crush” Hamas after the militants stormed into the country’s south last Saturday and massacred hundreds of people, including killings of children in their homes and young people at a music festival.

Amid grief and demands for vengeance among the Israeli public, the government is under intense pressure to topple Hamas rather than continuing to try to bottle it up in Gaza.

The number of people forced from their homes by Israel’s airstrikes soared 25 per cent in a day, reaching 423,000 out of a population of 2.3 million, the UN said.

The Israeli military continued to pulverised the Gaza Strip with airstrikes while preparing for a possible ground invasion and said its complete siege of the territory — which has left Palestinians desperate for food, fuel and medicine — would remain in place until Hamas militants free some 150 hostages taken during their grisly weekend incursion.

A visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, along with shipments of US weapons, offered a powerful green light to Israel to drive ahead with its retaliation in Gaza after Hamas’ deadly attack on civilians and soldiers, even as international aid groups warned of a worsening humanitarian crisis. Israel has halted deliveries of basic necessities and electricity to Gaza’s 2.3 million people and prevented entry of supplies from Egypt.

“Not a single electricity switch will be flipped on, not a single faucet will be turned on and not a single fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home,” Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz said on social media.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, said forces “are preparing for a ground manoeuvre” should political leaders order one.