Thousands of Palestinian civilians fled south from the fiercely contested northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Israel’s Cogat authority, responsible for Palestinian affairs, said around 50,000 people used the evacuation corridor on Wednesday alone. A spokeswoman for the U.N. Palestinian aid agency, UNRWA, was not yet able to provide a figure for Wednesday. In the last three days the trend has been increasing.
The Israeli army says more than 900,000 people have left the north since the war in Gaza began a month ago. The UN emergency relief office, OCHA, speaks of around 1.5 million internally displaced people in the Gaza Strip.
The coastal strip, which is smaller in area than Vienna, has more than 2.2 million inhabitants. The Israeli army had already given civilians in the north of the Gaza Strip a new window of opportunity to flee south. The army is allowing passage on a southern link road between 10am and 2pm local time (1pm CET), a spokesperson wrote in Arabic on Platform X (Twitter) that morning.
He published a map showing the street. The spokesperson urged people to move south as quickly as possible for their own safety. “The northern Gaza Strip is considered a fierce combat zone and time to evacuate is running out,” he wrote. Around noon, the spokesperson announced that due to heavy use of the escape corridor, the time slot would be extended by one hour.
A spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by the militant Hamas, said on Tuesday that there was no safe place in the entire Gaza Strip. He accused Israel of also committing “massacres” in the southern coastal strip. The spokesman therefore advised people in the north not to follow the orders of the Israeli army. Israel, on the other hand, accuses Hamas of deliberately abusing Palestinian civilians as “human shields.”
A hospital in the Gaza Strip had to significantly reduce operations due to a lack of fuel. Surgical procedures, X-rays and MRI scans will be stopped at Al-Quds Hospital, the Palestinian Red Crescent said on Wednesday. The power generating plant will also be stopped and only a smaller one will be used. There will be electricity in each of the three buildings for two hours a day so that the approximately 14,000 displaced people there can cook and charge their cell phones. Oxygen will also no longer be produced; they will only work with oxygen cylinders, it was said.
More than a week ago, the Israeli army opened a new phase in the war against Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, and expanded its operations on the ground. She had previously repeatedly urged people in the north to flee south of the isolated coastal strip. The military is currently fighting Hamas’ Islamic installations, especially in the north. But there were also repeated Israeli airstrikes in the south.
The number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip has risen to 10,569 since the war began exactly a month ago, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health. More than 26,000 people were injured, the official said on Wednesday. There are 4,324 children and young people among the dead. There are also 2,550 reports of missing people, of which 1,350 are minors. The numbers and information cannot currently be independently verified. This is reportedly by far the highest number of Palestinian deaths during a war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel’s history, which terrorists from the Islamic group Hamas and other Palestinian extremist organizations carried out in the border area on October 7. On the Israeli side, more than 1,400 people were killed, most of them civilians.