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Smoke over Rafah in the Gaza Strip after airstrikes by the Israeli army, October 12, 2023
MIDDLE EAST – The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of more than a million residents of the northern Gaza Strip southward within 24 hours, on the seventh day of the war between Israel and Hamas that Israel’s prime minister vowed to “smash.” That is half the population of this inland area with just over 2 million inhabitants.
Around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israel since hostilities began, sparked by a bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7. According to local authorities, the massive Israeli attacks carried out in response in the Gaza Strip resulted in 1,417 deaths, many of them civilians.
In a statement released around 6:30 a.m. French time, Israeli forces urged residents to move south of Wadi Gaza, a stream south of the city, “for their own safety.”
“They can only return to this part of the Gaza Strip if a further announcement is made allowing this. Do not approach the area of the security barrier with the State of Israel,” the statement said, adding: “In the coming days, the IDF will continue its significant operations in Gaza City and make significant efforts to avoid harm.” Civilians. »
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This request comes as the IDF struck more than 750 targets in the northern Gaza Strip last night, including, according to a statement: “underground Hamas terror tunnels, military compounds and posts, residences of high-ranking terrorists used as military command centers, weapons warehouses.” , communication rooms and high-ranking terrorists.
Not possible without “devastating consequences” –
Initially, the United Nations said it had been informed by the Israeli army of an order to “relocate” about 1.1 million residents from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south within 24 hours. The spokesman for the organization’s secretary general immediately called for the immediate reversal of this order.
In these circumstances, “the United Nations strongly calls for this order, if confirmed, to be repealed in order to prevent an already tragic situation from becoming a catastrophic situation,” he stressed.
He warned that an evacuation of this magnitude was “impossible without having devastating humanitarian consequences.”
The UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) sites host more than 60% of the 423,000 people displaced in Gaza in recent days, but the number present north of Wadi Gaza was not known at the time.
On the UN map below, Wadi Gaza is shown directly below Jaballa in brown dotted lines.
A few hours earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised to destroy Hamas after a meeting in Tel Aviv with American Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“Just as ISIS was dismantled, Hamas will also be dismantled,” the prime minister said, referring to the Islamic State group. Statements suggesting a ground offensive in Gaza against Hamas.
At dawn on October 7, the last day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, hundreds of Hamas militants entered Israel in vehicles by air and sea, killing more than a thousand civilians on the streets, at home or in the middle of a music festival , which sows terror under a barrage of missiles. Hamas also took dozens of hostages to Gaza. This extremely violent attack shocked the country and traumatized the survivors and the people who came to help the victims.
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