Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa Agence France-Presse Displaced Palestinians fleeing Israeli military operations in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, walk along the main Salah al-Din road in eastern Gaza City in order to reach the city center, October 22, 2024.
Published yesterday at 3:22 p.m.
Trapped for days by an Israeli army offensive, then rounded up and searched by soldiers demanding they evacuate, thousands of frightened Palestinians have fled the northern Gaza Strip.
Videos verified by AFP show dozens of displaced Gazans heading, amid a landscape of devastation, toward a checkpoint manned by soldiers in Jabalia, surrounded and pounded since October 6 by the Israeli army.
Nevin Al-Dawasah, an ambulance worker, told AFP that she was stuck for 16 days in a shelter in the Jabalia refugee camp before finally being able to escape under artillery fire.
The Israeli army says it is targeting fighters from Hamas in Jabalia, the Palestinian Islamist movement whose October 2023 attack on Israel triggered the war in the Gaza Strip. According to her, Hamas is rebuilding its forces there and “mingling with the civilian population.”
“We were surprised by a quadcopter that told us that the Israel Defense Forces were asking us to evacuate the area,” she explains, referring to the drones equipped with loudspeakers sometimes used by the army to call on residents of an area to leave before a bombing.
“We left the shelter, but suddenly there was a bombing,” killing and wounding people, said Dawasah, who filmed the incident.
To leave, she had to pass through several army checkpoints on the main roads between the north of the territory and Gaza City, surrounded by tanks and armoured vehicles.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000“When we left the shelter, the Israeli occupation separated the women and men and searched them,” said Dawasah, a refugee in Gaza City.
The army “told us we deserved to be beaten. They repeated this more than a hundred times from the top of the tank, and we were very scared,” she continued, adding that several men had been arrested.
Saida, 46, fled with her mother and four children from a UN refugee agency (UNRWA) school turned shelter in Jabalia. According to her, soldiers made her wait three hours at a checkpoint and arrested her son Amjad, 15.
They “forced him to undress,” she told AFP by phone.
“I walked with my three children and my elderly mother and waited near the checkpoint until they released him, after questioning him and asking him if he knew anyone from Hamas,” said Saida, who is afraid to give her last name.
“Only a small number of people” responded to the army’s calls to evacuate, Ismail al-Thawabteh, the head of the Hamas government’s communications department, told AFP, saying the Israeli army was “killing many displaced young men or arresting them in a humiliating way.”
The Civil Defense said Saturday that more than 400 people had died in the northern Gaza Strip since October 6.
“Tens of thousands of people have been displaced from northern areas such as Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun” to other parts of the northern Palestinian territory, such as Gaza City, said Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, who estimated that 400,000 people remained in the area.
The Hamas government’s media office urged the international community to act to “end the crimes of forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and massacres being perpetrated” in the north.
Frequent Israeli bombardments and destroyed roads have made it nearly impossible for ambulances and paramedics to reach the victims.
“Anyone who is injured bleeds to death,” Motaz Ayoub, a Civil Defense first aid worker, told AFP.
The shortages that were already affecting the Gaza Strip before the war have worsened.
According to the Health Ministry, all hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip are out of service, with the exception of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabalia, which is partially functioning.
There are “no medicines or medical supplies,” medical staff “cannot help them” and “bodies are lying in the streets,” its director, Hossam Abou Safia, said on Tuesday.
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