Many in Gaza City Ignore Israeli Military’s Calls to Evacuate
During nine months of war, Amani Zanin’s extended family has fled from place to place, escaping the Israeli bombardments that have flattened many neighborhoods in northern Gaza.
But this week, when the Israeli military issued repeated calls for Palestinians to clear out of Gaza City, the Zanin family and many others decided not to leave.
“The road is not safe,” said Ms. Zanin, whose family is now sheltering in a school building.
Exhausted by the constant threat of bombardment and encircled by death and decimation, families in the northern Gaza Strip who heeded earlier warnings to flee are now taking the risk of staying put.
Fliers dropped by the Israeli military over parts of Gaza City and posted on social media laid out four “safe corridors” Palestinians could use to get to central Gaza “quickly and without inspection.”
“Gaza City will remain a dangerous combat zone,” the fliers warned.
Residents also reported receiving multiple calls on their cellular phones from the Israeli military with a recorded message warning them to flee south.
Few appear to be heeding the warnings.
In interviews, people in Gaza City, which before the war was the most populous city in the enclave, said they had decided to stay in their homes or in the places where they have been sheltering, like relatives’ homes, hospitals and schools. They said they feared the potential dangers from Israeli forces on the evacuation routes, and knew there was no real safety in the south.
“The fact is people are being killed wherever we are, either in the north or in the south,” said Ahmed Sidu, a native of Gaza City. “In my family, we agreed that no one will be displaced.”
Ms. Zanin said the trip south had to be made on foot because the Israeli military doesn’t allow vehicles on parts of the route. Walking for hours in the summer heat would be too much for some of her older relatives. “We haven’t seen anyone who has left,” she said.
But in some parts of the north, Gazans have had no choice but to leave.
Since last month, Israeli forces have been waging offensives on several parts of the north — where the ground invasion began last October — saying they were returning to battle regrouped fighters from Hamas and other armed Palestinian alliances.
The Israelis’ return has triggered new exoduses of civilians.
“People are on the run everywhere,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the United Nations aid agency for Palestinians.
Across the enclave, some 1.9 million people — around 90 percent of the population — have been displaced by the war, some as many as 10 times, the U.N. estimates.
In the north, with the fighting resumed, medical services have become almost nonexistent.
Doctors Without Borders temporarily closed its last health center there after the area came under heavy fire, the organization said on Wednesday evening. It said evacuation orders and destruction of health facilities had left the sick or injured in northern Gaza with very few options.
The desperate situation in northern Gaza comes amid an international push for a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas.
On Thursday, Israel also came under increased pressure to rein in the expansion of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and to curb settler violence there. The United States announced more sanctions on extremist settler groups, and the Group of 7 condemned the Israeli government’s moves to expand Jewish outposts.
“The United States remains deeply concerned about extremist violence and instability in the West Bank, which undermines Israel’s own security,” the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
Mr. Miller encouraged Israel “to take immediate steps” to hold the same individuals and entities accountable. “In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures,” he said.
The far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to be moved by the criticism. Expanding Israel’s hold over the West Bank is a goal of many ministers in his coalition, including Bezalel Smotrich, a settler activist who recently secured the approval to legalize five Jewish outposts, which the G7 denounced.
The G7, in a statement on Thursday, called out Mr. Smotrich specifically, as well as a recent Israeli government announcement that it will designate more than 3,000 acres of land in the West Bank as “state lands” and plans to expand existing settlements with nearly 5,300 new housing units.
“The government of Israel’s settlement program is inconsistent with international law, and counterproductive to the cause of peace,” the G7 leaders wrote.
Even as the Israelis were coming under broad international criticism, a U.S. official said on Thursday that Washington planned to authorize part of a weapons shipment to Israel that it had withheld in the spring over concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza.
The official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that the United States would send 1,700 500-pound bombs that had been held up because they were part of a shipment that had also included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, which the country has chosen not to ship to Israel.
President Biden halted the shipment in the spring to prevent the U.S.-made weapons from being used in Israel’s assault on the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza. It was the first time that Mr. Biden tried to influence Israel’s approach to the war by using his power to curtail arms.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London, Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar, and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.
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