Israel on Tuesday ordered a complete evacuation of Gaza City, home to around a million Palestinians, ahead of its controversial military takeover.
“To all residents of Gaza City and all its neighborhoods, from the Old City and Tuffah in the east to the sea in the west. The IDF is determined to defeat Hamas and will operate in the Gaza City area with great force, just as it did throughout the Strip,” Avichay Adraee, the military’s Arabic spokesperson said on Tuesday.
“For your safety, evacuate immediately via the Rashid axis toward the humanitarian zone in Al-Mawasi,” he added.
Leaflets carrying the message, which included a map directing residents across northern Gaza to travel westward to the coast before going south, were also dropped across the north.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinians to evacuate Gaza City on Monday, saying “this is only the beginning of the intensified ground maneuver” there. The warning came hours after the military intensified airstrikes on the urban area.
Israel has been targeting high-rise towers in the densely populated city in recent days as it moves forward with plans to occupy it in defiance of domestic and international opposition.
The United Nations’ Human Rights Chief Volker Türk has warned that an Israeli escalation in Gaza City would lead to “more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocity crimes.”
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have also taken to the streets to protest the planned takeover of the city, fearing that it would endanger the remaining hostages there and put the lives of soldiers at risk.
The Israeli military has expanded operations in recent weeks to seize Gaza City, which it says is key to defeating Hamas. It now claims control of about 40% of the enclave’s largest city.
As of Wednesday, only 70,000 Palestinians – less than 10% of Gaza’s City’s roughly one million residents – had evacuated, a senior Israeli official said, making up less than 10% of the total population.
A source familiar with the matter told CNN earlier that Israel was planning to halt humanitarian airdrops over Gaza City and reduce the entry of aid trucks into the northern part of the strip, a move apparently designed to drive its residents to leave by depriving them of access to food.
Last month, COGAT, the Israeli agency that manages the flow of aid into Gaza, announced that it would be providing Palestinians in Gaza with tents before relocating them to the south of the enclave.
But only 3,000 tents have entered the entire territory so far, the senior Israeli official said on Tuesday, adding that the goal was to deliver 100,000 tents within three weeks. “We want to flood Gaza with tents,” the official said.
Meanwhile, the United States and Israel plan to expand the number of aid distribution sites run by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) from four to 16, an Israeli official told CNN last month. None of these new sites would be in Gaza City, the official said. There is no indication yet that the new sites have all been established.
When plans for the takeover were announced, some Gaza City residents told CNN that they would rather die in their homes than be displaced again.
Um Samed, a 59-year-old mother of five, told Reuters that she had to make the decision whether “to stay and die at home in Gaza City, or follow (Israel’s) orders and leave Gaza and die in the south.”