When Samir Hassan and his surviving family members fled their home in the central Gaza Strip town of Mughraqa weeks ago, they did so under intense Israeli airstrikes that killed several family members, including an uncle, and seriously injured his brother.
They settled in a tent in the nearby Nuseirat area, where tens of thousands of Palestinians forced by the Israeli air and ground offensive had also fled, finding so much shelter in overcrowded schools, dilapidated tents or even out on the streets, as they could.
Now Mr Hassan's family have been warned they will have to move again.
The Israeli military ordered more than 150,000 people to leave parts of the central Gaza Strip this week. “The area you are in is considered an area of deadly fighting,” he warned pamphlets which were dropped over houses, shelters and camps.
“God willing, this will be the last time we will be evicted,” said Mr. Hassan, 22, a taxi driver. The family lost everything in their first escape, he said.
Israel's war against Hamas has forced many of Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinians to repeatedly flee for their lives as airstrikes pound their cities and Israeli forces press ahead with their ground invasion.
According to the United Nations, there are six emergency shelters in the currently threatened area, which covers about nine square kilometers, housing about 61,000 displaced people, mostly from the northern Gaza Strip. This is in addition to the region's 90,000 original residents.
In its most recent evacuation orders, Israel ordered people to immediately go to emergency shelters, which the UN says can barely accommodate the several hundred thousand people already there.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians estimates that about 1.9 million people in Gaza, or nearly 85 percent of the population, are displaced.
Palestinians seek help after an Israeli attack in the central Gaza Strip on Thursday.Credit: Mohammed Asad/Associated Press
“Forced to move again,” he said the agency said on Thursday. “The Israeli authorities’ evacuation order for the central Gaza Strip is leading to ongoing forced relocations. Over 150,000 people – young children, women with babies, people with disabilities and the elderly – have nowhere to go.”
The only remaining hope for Gazans is a ceasefire, the agency said.
Israel's evacuation orders – which the United Nations says result in forced displacement, a war crime – have been at times contradictory and confusing. And even if the people of Gaza once again make the difficult decision to uproot their families, they are forced to make impossible decisions because they have no safe places to go.
The Israeli bombing and siege of Gaza have decimated large swaths of the Palestinian enclave and its infrastructure, left millions starving and exposed to the elements, and precipitated a public health catastrophe.
Israel has said it is addressing humanitarian concerns, including those raised by the United States. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, said on social media that in an effort to make Gaza residents understand evacuation instructions, they had published gridded maps “to ensure your safety.”
However, according to an analysis of visual evidence by The New, Israel has routinely used 2,000-pound bombs – one of the largest and most destructive the United States has delivered – in densely populated areas in the southern Gaza Strip, where civilians have been ordered to shelter in place for safety reasons move York Times.
At Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, a mother of five said she and 20 members of her extended family had arrived there the previous day. It is the fourth time since the war began that the family, including a 10-month-old baby, has been forced to flee.
“They threatened the entire block around us, even the new camp, even Market Street — they threatened everything,” she said. “They dropped leaflets asking us to leave within three days. So we had to come here.”
Living in a flimsy tent in the winter cold made all of her children sick, she said. Now they live on the cold sidewalk in front of the hospital.
“We don’t have any mattresses,” she said. “We only have blankets. Either we cover ourselves with it or we sleep on it.”
—Raja Abdulrahim and Ameera Harouda