Air strikes on crowded U.N. shelters in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed more than 80 people on Saturday, as Israeli plans to expand operations to southern Gaza heightened the fears of hundreds of thousands of civilians who have sought refuge there.
Underscoring the reminder that there is no safe place for civilians in the Gaza Strip, an airstrike outside the southern town of Khan Younis killed at least 26 people in the early hours of Saturday.
The largest hospital in northern Gaza, al-Shifa, discharged all but 120 of the most vulnerable patients and five doctors who cared for them. As bombs continued to fall, the area had only basic medical resources for new victims.
A dawn attack on a United Nations-run school in Jabalia camp killed at least 50 people, and an attack on another building there killed 32 members of a single family – 19 of them children, officials said Hamas-run health ministry with AFP.
Photos taken outside the Indonesian hospital showed more than 20 bodies lined up and wrapped in bloodstained sheets. UN officials condemned the deaths.
“Shelters are a place of safety. Schools are a place of learning. “Tragic news of the children, women and men killed while seeking shelter at Al-Fakhouri School in northern Gaza,” UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said on X. “Civilians can and “We shouldn’t have to endure this any longer.”
The Israeli military, which warned residents of Jabalia to leave in a social media post in Arabic, declined to immediately comment when asked about the attacks.
For weeks, Israel has been calling on civilians in and around Gaza City to move south for their protection, and large numbers have complied with that request. Last week, the Israeli military for the first time urged people to leave areas in the south around the town of Khan Younis, where residents include many recently displaced people from the north.
A column of medics, patients and refugees trooped out of Al-Shifa hospital, the largest in Gaza, where Israeli troops spent a fourth day searching for evidence of an underground Hamas command node.
Hamas authorities claimed that the Israeli military ordered everyone to leave the hospital. An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman said they had facilitated an evacuation requested by medical personnel.
Those who walked south under the tense gaze of Israeli troops, through a hellscape of tangled rubble that was buildings two months ago, along roads ravaged by weapons and turned into mud by tanks, had little hope of peace , when they reached the south.
Patients and internally displaced persons at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City earlier this week. Photo: Ismail Zanoun/AFP/Getty ImagesShelters are overcrowded, food and water supplies are so low that the UN has warned that Palestinians face an “imminent possibility” of starvation, infectious diseases are spreading and the war there is likely to intensify in the coming days.
As Israeli planes hit northern Gaza early in the war and troops prepared to invade, Israeli embassies urged civilians to move south of the Wadi Gaza wetland for their own safety.
Despite the risks of travel and severe overcrowding in shelters and private homes, hundreds of thousands followed these instructions. About 1.6 million people are displaced, more than two-thirds of the population, the United Nations said.
They found only relative safety. Forty days after the start of the war, 3,676 people had been killed in the southern areas that Israel had declared safer. They were responsible for a third of all Palestinian deaths in the conflict, according to a UN map based on figures from Gaza health authorities. Now many of those people have been told to move again, crowding into an even smaller area along the coast, around the town of Mawasi.
“They asked us, the citizens of Gaza, to go to the south. We went south. Now they are asking us to leave. Where are we going?” Atya Abu Jab told Portal he was standing in front of the tent where his family who fled Gaza City lives, one of many makeshift houses.
Early on Saturday morning, bombs hit a multi-storey apartment block in Hamad City, a middle-class housing estate in Khan Younis, killing 26 people and wounding 23 others. A few miles north, six Palestinians were killed in an attack on a house in the town of Deir Al-Balah.
Eyad al-Zaeem lost his aunt, her children and grandchildren, who he said left northern Gaza on Israeli orders. “All of them suffered martyrdom. They had nothing to do with the (Hamas) resistance,” Zaeem said outside the Nasser Hospital mortuary.
Israel’s chief military spokesman, Admiral Daniel Hagari, said Friday that his troops would attack “wherever Hamas exists, including in the south of the Strip.” He said: “We are determined to move forward with our operation.”
Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged in an interview last week that the war had caused heavy civilian casualties, but blamed Hamas for the deaths. “That is what we want to achieve: minimal civilian casualties. But unfortunately we are not successful,” he told CBS.
It is not clear where civilians might go to escape the fighting if it intensifies in the south. Gaza was already densely populated before the fighting began, sparked by Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians.
2.3 million people lived in an area of 365 square kilometers. The north is now largely empty, and most people live in the south, in private homes or overcrowded UN shelters.
Aid agencies say they are unable to provide food, water and medical care to people there due to fuel shortages, communication problems and the blockage of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza.
These problems would be exacerbated if civilians were asked to retreat to a smaller area, increasing the indirect costs of war. Security officials in Israel have openly said they expect civilian deaths, already unprecedented in decades, to increase as fighting shifts to crowded areas.
“There will probably be more civilian casualties,” Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told Portal, adding: “It will not deter us or prevent us from moving forward.”
On Friday, Hamas-run health authorities updated the toll to more than 12,000 dead, including 5,000 children. The UN considers these figures to be credible, based on verification processes in previous conflicts in the Gaza Strip.
Some in Gaza and across the region fear that Israel wants to drive Palestinians from their devastated territory and seek a new Nakba, or catastrophe. The Arabic term for the forcible expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from Palestine previously controlled by the British Mandatory Power during the period following the establishment of Israel in 1948.
A week ago, Israeli Security Cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Töpfer said in a television interview: “We are now implementing the Gaza Nakba.” Netanyahu warned cabinet ministers the next day to choose their words carefully.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi was among regional leaders who told a security summit in Bahrain that Israel should not try to expel Palestinians from the territory, saying Jordan would “do whatever is necessary to stop their expulsion.” “We will never allow that to happen.” that should happen; Aside from being a war crime, it would also be a direct threat to our national security.”