The Israeli military on Friday ordered hundreds of thousands of Gaza City residents to evacuate “for their own safety and protection” ahead of a feared Israeli ground offensive.
The announcement followed a UN spokesman’s claim that the military had ordered an evacuation within 24 hours of the entire northern Gaza Strip, a region home to 1.1 million people – about half the territory’s population.
The order, issued on the seventh day of the war after a deadly Hamas attack, tells residents to flee deeper south into the Gaza Strip, a narrow coastal area. The Israeli statement claimed that Hamas fighters were hiding in tunnels beneath the city.
It could be the strongest response yet to Hamas’ shock attack on Saturday, and smaller attacks have since killed more than 1,500 people in Israel, including 247 soldiers – a figure not seen in Israel for decades.
This could be a sign of an impending ground offensive, although the Israeli military has not yet confirmed such a call. On Thursday it was said that no decision had been made regarding the preparations.
The Israeli military on Friday ordered the evacuation within 24 hours of the northern Gaza Strip, a region home to 1.1 million people – about half the territory’s population, a UN spokesman said. Pictured: Palestinian children injured in Israeli attacks are taken to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Wednesday
The order sent to the UN comes as Israel presses ahead with an offensive against Hamas militants. UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric described the order as “impossible” without “devastating humanitarian consequences”.
Earlier, the Israeli military pulverized the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, preparing for a possible ground invasion and saying the complete siege of the area – which has left Palestinians desperate for food, fuel and medicine – would continue until Hamas Militants released about 150 hostages they took during a grisly raid over the weekend.
As the full extent of the weekend’s horrors became clear, the Israeli military stepped up preparations for a ground invasion and Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israel.
“Now is the time for war,” Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said as his country deployed tanks near the Gaza Strip.
To drum up support for its response, the Israeli government showed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO defense ministers graphic images of children and civilians it said Hamas killed in a weekend shooting spree in Israel.
Blinken said they showed a “bullet-riddled” baby, beheaded soldiers and burned young people in their cars.
“It’s just depravity in the worst form imaginable,” he said. “It really goes beyond anything we can comprehend.”
Israel has vowed to retaliate for the attack – the deadliest Palestinian militant in Israel’s history.
Like others around the world, Blinken called on Israel to show restraint but also reiterated America’s support, saying: “We will always stand with you.”
On Friday he was due to meet King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as part of a Middle East trip to prevent the war from spreading.
An armed Palestinian militant leads a man during the Supernova music festival
An armed Palestinian militant is seen at the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev Desert of southern Israel
Student Noa Argamani sits on a terrorist’s motorcycle and points at her helpless friend with her arms outstretched. She begs for her life
Consequences: Burnt out and abandoned cars in which revelers tried to escape the onslaught
At least 260 people were killed in the massacre, with many still missing – either dead or taken hostage by the bloodthirsty militants
America’s top diplomat Blinken planned to visit key US allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – some of which have influence over Hamas, an Iran-backed Islamist group.
Halevi said lessons were being learned from the security failures around Gaza that made the attack possible.
“We will learn and investigate, but now is the time for war,” he said.
The U.S. military places no conditions on its security assistance to Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, adding that Washington expects the Israeli military to “do the right things” in waging its war against Hamas.
Austin was scheduled to be in Israel on Friday and planned to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas called on Palestinians on Friday to protest the Israeli bombing of the enclave, urging them to march to Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem and clash with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank.
Public broadcaster Kan said the Israeli death toll had risen to over 1,300.
The death toll in the US rose to 27.
Scores of Israeli and foreign hostages were returned to Gaza; Israel said it had identified 97 of them.
Israel has so far responded by laying siege to Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, and launching a bombing campaign that has destroyed entire neighborhoods.
Authorities in the Gaza Strip said more than 1,500 Palestinians were killed.
Israel has stopped deliveries of essential goods and electricity to the 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip and prevented the import of goods from Egypt.
“Not a single power switch will be flipped, not a single faucet will be turned on and not a single tanker truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home,” Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz said on social media.
Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters on Thursday that the armed forces were “preparing for a ground exercise” should political leaders order one.
A ground offensive in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where the population is densely packed into a strip of land just 25 miles long, would likely result in more casualties on both sides in brutal urban warfare.
The Israeli bombardment that followed killed more than 1,530 people in Gaza, according to authorities on both sides.
Israel says about 1,500 Hamas fighters have been killed in Israel and that hundreds of those killed in Gaza were Hamas members. Thousands were injured on both sides.
As Israel bombs Gaza from the air, Hamas militants have fired thousands of rockets into Israel.
Amid concerns that fighting could spread to the region, Syrian state media reported that Israeli airstrikes disabled two Syrian international airports on Thursday.
The relentless shelling of the Gaza Strip – which the military says has included 6,000 rounds of ammunition so far – has left Palestinians running through the streets with their belongings, seeking safety
A strike Thursday afternoon in the Jabaliya refugee camp tore down a residential building on families seeking refuge there, killing at least 45 people, Gaza’s Interior Ministry said.
According to a list of victims, at least 23 of the dead were under 18, including a one-month-old child.
The al-Shihab family home was full of relatives who had fled bombings in other areas. Neighbors said a second house was hit at the same time, but the death toll was not immediately known.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We can’t escape because wherever you go, you’re bombed,” said a neighbor, Khalil Abu Yahia. “It takes a miracle to survive here.”
The number of people forced from their homes by the airstrikes rose 25% in a day, reaching 423,000 in a population of 2.3 million, the United Nations said on Thursday. Most of them crowded into UN schools.
Families limited themselves to one meal a day, said Rami Swailem, a 34-year-old lecturer at Al-Azhar University, in whose home 32 relatives found refuge. Water has stopped flowing into the building for two days and they have rationed what is left in a tank on the roof.
Alaa Younis Abuel-Omrain remained in a UN school after an attack on her home killed eight members of her family – her mother, her aunt, a sister, a brother and his wife, and their three children. Most bakeries stopped producing bread due to a lack of electricity.
“Even if there is food in some areas, we can’t get there because of strikes,” she said.
On Wednesday, Gaza’s only power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, leaving only lights powered by scattered private generators.
Hospitals, overwhelmed by a constant influx of wounded people and running out of supplies, only have a few days’ worth of fuel before the power goes out, aid workers say.
“Without electricity, hospitals risk becoming morgues,” said Fabrizio Carboni, regional director of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Neonatal incubators, kidney dialysis machines, X-ray machines and more all rely on electricity, he said.
Rescue workers bringing bodies to the mortuary of Gaza’s largest hospital, Shifa, were unable to find space.
Dozens of body bags were lined up in the hospital parking lot. Fourteen health facilities were damaged in strikes, health authorities said on Thursday.
With Israel sealing off the territory, the only way in or out is through the border crossing with Egypt at Rafah, but Egypt’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that airstrikes on Rafah had prevented the operation.
Egypt has tried to persuade Israel and the United States to allow aid and fuel through the border crossing.
Israel is using a new tactic that involves razing entire neighborhoods, not just individual buildings.
Hecht, the military spokesman, said the attack decisions were based on intelligence about locations used by Hamas and that civilians had been warned.
“Right now our focus is on taking out their leadership,” Hecht said. The military said the strikes hit Hamas’ elite forces in Nukhba, including command centers used by the militants in Saturday’s attack and the home of a senior Hamas naval agent where weapons were stored.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “crush” Hamas after the militants stormed into the south of the country on Saturday and massacred hundreds of people, including children in their homes and young people at a music festival.
Netanyahu said Hamas’s atrocities included the beheading of soldiers and the rape of women, descriptions that could not immediately be independently confirmed.
Amid the Israeli public’s grief and demands for revenge, the government is under intense pressure to topple Hamas rather than continue trying to contain it in Gaza.
In a video released Thursday, Hamas civilians defended the group’s rampage and lamented civilian deaths in Gaza from six days of Israeli airstrikes.
The celebratory video lacked the bravado of a recording broadcast Saturday by Hamas’ military wing celebrating the “greatest battle” while the massacres were still ongoing.
Basem Naim, a former minister in the Hamas government, said that in Saturday’s “rapid collapse” of the Israeli military, “chaos reigned and civilians were in the middle of the confrontation.”
This claim is contradicted by countless videos and survivor accounts showing Hamas militants targeting and killing civilians in Israel.
Naim added that there would be no action to release the 150 prisoners returned to Gaza as long as Israel’s operation continued.
Israel was a mourning nation. At a funeral for a 25-year-old woman who was killed along with at least 260 other people in a desert rave, and at another service for a slain Israeli soldier, mourners sat cross-legged on the floor next to coffins and wailed or cried quietly .
In Gaza, grieving families also buried together in shrouds. At a funeral, they placed the abused body of a little girl in the arms of her murdered father.
Growing anger over the failure of the Israeli military and intelligence agencies in the surprise attack is aimed at Netanyahu’s far-right government, which for months pushed forward a controversial legal reform that divided the country and impacted the military.
In what appears to be the first admission of guilt by a member of the government, Israeli Education Minister Yoav Kisch told the Israeli news agency Ynet: “We bear responsibility.” As a member of the government, I bear responsibility. “We were dealing with nonsense.”
Israel’s public diplomacy minister resigned, marking the first rift in Netanyahu’s government since the attack.
Four previous conflicts ended with Hamas still in firm control of the territory it had ruled since 2007. Israel has mobilized 360,000 reservists, massed forces near Gaza and evacuated tens of thousands of residents from surrounding communities.
A new war cabinet, including a long-time opposition politician, was sworn in on Thursday to lead the fight.
A senior Hamas official, Saleh Al-Arouri, warned on Thursday that any Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip “will lead to a catastrophe for its army” and said the group was ready to respond.
The foreign minister will also meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose power is limited to parts of the occupied West Bank, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin planned to visit Israel on Friday.