New Israeli Evacuation Order in Gaza Displaces Palestinians Again
The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of several neighborhoods in southern Gaza on Saturday, the latest in a series of such directives recently that have forced tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians to relocate yet again.
The decision affects an area around the city of Khan Younis that Israel had previously designated a “humanitarian zone” for Palestinian civilians, who are weary from nearly a year of unrelenting war and a daily struggle to avoid disease and find enough food and clean water to survive.
“People aren’t being regarded as people,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the main United Nations agency providing aid to Palestinians in Gaza. “They’re being treated as pinballs and chess pieces.”
The Israeli military said its recent evacuations and operations in Khan Younis have targeted a renewed Hamas insurgency and accused Hamas of installing weapons infrastructure in the area under the latest evacuation order on Saturday.
Over the past week, amid new evacuation orders, more than 190,000 people have fled the places where they were sheltering in southern and central Gaza, the United Nations said on Friday.
Dozens of people have been killed in fighting in the area, according to both Israel and Palestinian health officials. The Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had killed more than 100 militants in Khan Younis in recent days, while Palestinian health officials have said that at least some casualties arriving at local hospitals with severe blast wounds have been women and children.
There was also a new Israeli strike in central Gaza on Saturday, in an area some miles north of the zone under the latest evacuation order. Palestinian health officials reported that the Israeli military struck a school-turned-shelter that the Al-Aqsa hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah was using to provide medical services to Palestinians.
More than 30 people were killed in the Israeli attack and scores more wounded, according to Khalil al-Daqran, a spokesman for the Al-Aqsa hospital.
The Israeli military said its forces had struck a Hamas command and control center within the school grounds, which it claimed had been used to wage attacks against the Israeli military and store weapons.
Tariq Abutaha, 30, said in an interview on Saturday that he had fled his home in the Khan Younis suburb of Qizan al-Najjar — inside the zone under the new evacuation order — on Friday as rumors of an impending Israeli operation swirled. He last left there in December, expecting to return a week or two later. But he returned after five months of fighting in the city to find his home partially ruined.
On Friday evening, Mr. Abutaha said he paid $400 for a small truck to ferry 20 family members and whatever belongings they could load to the coastal area of Al Mawasi, which Israel has called a “safer zone” since the early days of the war. As they drove, he watched one scene after another of people fleeing on foot or camping out amid the rubble in the streets.
“We want to get back to our lives. By God, we’re exhausted,” said Mr. Abutaha, as he settled in, once again, in a crowded tent on Gaza’s coast.
Hassan Shehada, 61, a displaced person in Qizan al-Najjar, said he and 25 family members had failed to find a place to go and would remain in the evacuation area, at least until Sunday morning, despite Israel’s orders.
“We have no idea what to do. This is a real problem. We’re tired of moving over and over,” he said, likening life in Gaza to going through “a slow death.”
In any case, fleeing to comply with Israeli evacuation orders provides little guarantee of safety for Palestinian civilians.
The Israeli military has said it will target Hamas anywhere the armed group operates, contending it has used schools, hospitals, and the Israeli-designated “safer zone” for military purposes.
Israeli ground forces invaded Khan Younis in December, beginning a four-month battle that devastated the city. After the troops withdrew in April, some residents returned to their homes, began clearing streets, and sought to rebuild their lives as much as possible.
Then came another wave of Israeli evacuation orders in early July, followed by at least two more sets of instructions for Palestinians to flee their neighborhoods. For many, it was far from their first time fleeing their homes.
Kamal al-Madhoun, 66, said he saw hundreds of displaced people arriving in western Khan Younis on Saturday, carrying heavy bags and looks of desperation on their faces.
Watching the people trying to find a place to set up makeshift shelters worried Mr. al-Madhoun, who wondered whether he might find himself in the same situation next.
“Absolutely nothing is permanent,” he said. “We’re always full of fear that we’ll have to go through that miserable experience again.”
The Israeli military said another reason for the wide-scale operations in this area recently was an attempt to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages.
Israeli forces worked for almost 30 hours on Wednesday to extract the bodies of five hostages from a tunnel shaft nearly 200 meters long and 20 meters underground, the military said.
“We were right next to those bodies in the past” without knowing it, lamented Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff. “We didn’t know how to reach them.”
The operation in Khan Younis was escalating again just days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met with President Biden in Washington, where they discussed efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza that would also free the roughly 115 living and dead hostages there.
The negotiations appear to have ground to a halt in recent weeks, despite some renewed optimism. Israel has yet to formally issue its response to Hamas’s latest counterproposal, which the Palestinian group handed to Qatari and Egyptian mediators in early July.
Relatives of several American-Israeli hostages met with Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday. After the discussions, they expressed hope that an agreement could yet go forward; in November, roughly 105 of the 250 hostages were freed in a weeklong truce.
“We feel probably more optimistic than we have since the first round of releases in late November,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui was abducted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, told reporters at a news conference.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting to this article.
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