Aug. 25, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC
By Freddie Clayton
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being squeezed into ever smaller patches of land as Israeli military-designated humanitarian areas shrink to just 11% of the enclave’s territory, according to the United Nations, following a flurry of evacuation notices as Israel continues its military campaign across Gaza.
In August alone, the Israel Defense Forces issued 12 evacuation orders, according to the U.N., with an additional order Saturday afternoon, forcing as many as 250,000 people to move again in search of safety. At the beginning of the year, 33% of Gaza was an IDF-designated humanitarian zone.
Using satellite imagery analysis, the U.N. said the evacuation notices have resulted in population movements toward Muwasi, a former fishing village on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast that has since turned into a crowded tent camp, as well as toward Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza.
The U.N. estimates that most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are now confined to an area of roughly 15 square miles — about two-thirds the size of Manhattan — causing crowded conditions and a critical lack of basic services, like clean water.
The IDF, which designates the borders of the humanitarian areas, says that it issues evacuation orders to mitigate civilian harm and that it adjusted designations after rockets and mortars were fired toward Israel from humanitarian zones.
A Palestinian family walked to a safer area last week after the IDF called for the evacuation of the Hamad, a neighborhood in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Abed Rahim Khatib / Anadolu via Getty ImagesHamas’ government media office said the IDF was “deliberately suffocating” Palestinians in “narrow, inhumane areas” that are “not prepared for human life.”
Louise Wateridge, a spokesperson for UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian aid, said that the orders are changing “almost by the hour” and that people were leaving behind toothbrushes and shoelaces as they fled newly declared conflict zones.
“Sometimes the military action that follows has been within 30 minutes of the order given,” she told NBC News. “There’s a lot of confusion and panic.”
The IDF did not respond to a request for comment on the limited time people have to respond to evacuation orders, as well as the impact of crowded conditions on basic services, sanitation and the spread of disease.
The U.N. says evacuation orders issued since the current conflict began have displaced 90% of Gaza’s residents, often multiple times.
Doaa Qeita, a mother of three children, told NBC News that her family had been moved “at least seven times” since the war began. She said they had moved from Gaza City to Khan Younis to Rafah and back to Khan Younis.
Two weeks ago, they received another order to leave.
“She was born on Jan. 10,” Qeita says of her 7-month-old baby. “This is the seventh time she has been displaced in seven months.”
The IDF issued a new evacuation order for Palestinians in Khan Younis this month, as well as eastern Deir Al Balah, an area it had not invaded before. The IDF said in a statement that it distributed flyers in both areas, explaining that they had become dangerous “due to significant acts of terrorism,” adding that militants had regularly been firing rockets from Khan Younis.
Ever-blurrier lines between safe zones and conflict zones have led to casualties.
Palestinians run from a blast in a neighborhood of Deir al Balah, Gaza.Ali Jadallah / Anadolu via Getty ImagesLast week, at least seven people — two children and five women — were killed in an Israeli tank strike on the Bani Suhaila district of Khan Younis, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense, which provides emergency services in the enclave.
Eyewitness Ahamed Samour said he and others believed they had been in a safe zone as families ate lunch together. He added that “there isn’t any ‘safe zone’ so far in the entirety of Gaza.”
Another UNWRA spokesperson, Adnan Abu Hasna, said that the displaced were being treated like “chess stones” and that congested safe zones were subject to diseases spreading widely across the population, such as hepatitis C.
The U.N. said a 10-month-old baby has been partially paralyzed after having contracted polio, which had been largely eradicated in Gaza for 25 years but is now in danger of surging because of the dire sanitation crisis. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said this month that hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of contracting polio.
On a phone call Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Joe Biden stressed the urgency of reaching a cease-fire and hostage release deal. He also spoke with the leaders of Qatar and Egypt as negotiators seeking a cease-fire deal met in Cairo.
An Israeli official told NBC News that Israeli diplomats will head to Cairo for further talks despite intensified fighting between Israel and Hezbollah over the Lebanese-Israeli border Sunday and concerns that the latest regional escalation could stifle an elusive deal. Hezbollah is an ally of Hamas, and both are backed by Iran.
H.A. Hellyer, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said he believes the cease-fire negotiations were “already in pieces” before the latest round of strikes.
“I don’t think those negotiations were really going anywhere anyway,” he told NBC News.
Israel’s monthslong assault on the enclave has killed more than 40,000 people and injured 90,000, according to local health officials; the numbers do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The offensive was launched in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, in which 1,200 people, 790 of them civilians, were killed and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.
According to the U.N. most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are now confined to an area of roughly 15 square miles — about two-thirds the size of Manhattan.Mohammed Salem / ReutersU.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said cease-fire talks had reached a “decisive moment” as he met last week with Israeli leaders on his ninth trip to the Middle East since the current conflict began.
He said it was “time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process,” as parties pushed for a deal to secure the release of the more than 100 hostages who remain held in Gaza.
While negotiations continue, the fighting goes on, with thousands on the move as they try to avoid it.
On Saturday afternoon, the IDF issued another warning to all those in the Al-Masdar and Al-Maghazi municipalities, as well as nine other neighborhoods, to “evacuate the areas immediately” as another part of Gaza became unlivable.
Freddie Clayton
Freddie Clayton is a freelance journalist based in London. » …
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