With makeshift white flags in hand, dozens of Palestinians fled on Tuesday from the north of the Gaza Strip, where fierce fighting is raging between the Israeli army and Hamas, to the south of the Palestinian territory.
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“It was so scary,” Ola el-Ghul, a Palestinian displaced by that war, which entered its second month on Tuesday, told AFP.
“We held hands and kept walking,” she said. “There were so many of us. We held white flags. It’s true that we were scared, but in the end we managed to get through,” she added.
The Israeli army again issued leaflets on Monday calling on the civilian population to leave the northern Gaza Strip towards the south.
AFP videos show many people, including children, walking towards the south of the Gaza Strip, often with just a small bag. Some make the journey in a cart pulled by a donkey. Others are in wheelchairs.
According to the United Nations, Israeli bombings have led to the displacement of 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip, a poor area of 2.4 million people. According to the United Nations, there were currently between 300,000 and 400,000 civilians in the northern Gaza Strip.
“We came on foot from the center of the Gaza Strip to the south. I didn’t think it would take so long,” explains Amira Al-Sakani, hugging one of her small children.
She says she saw “bodies of martyrs” along the way, a term that refers to Palestinians killed in connection with the conflict with Israel, “some in pieces.”
More than 10,300 people, including more than 4,000 children, have been killed in Gaza by incessant bombardment by the Israeli army.
This war between Israel and Hamas was triggered by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s bloody attack on Israeli soil on October 7, in which more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
Decaying body
In retaliation, Israel vowed to “destroy” Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army launched a ground operation on October 27th.
The bombings are hitting civilians hard, including in the south of the territory, which is also under a siege that has deprived them of water, food and electricity since October 9 – after more than 16 years of blockade since Hamas came to power in 2007 classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, nearly 3,600 people have died in the southern and central Gaza Strip.
Many of these displaced people told AFP about the difficulty of reaching a region where they hope to be safer.
Haitham Noureddine said he walked four kilometers with his mother and other family members to the Bureij refugee camp in the center of the territory, seeing rotting bodies along the way. The family left their home in Gaza City near Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, due to heavy shelling in the area.
“The situation is terrible, the situation is not humane, the situation is catastrophic,” said another displaced person, Motaz El-Ajala.
Hatim Abu Riash claims to have been afraid as he walked near the Israeli soldiers.
“Near the soldiers, near the weapons, near the tanks (…), it was really terrible,” said this man, who fled the repeatedly bombed Jabalyia refugee camp in the north.
“We are not terrorists, we are civilians. We want to live in peace,” he said.
But the need is not just limited to the northern Gaza Strip. In the center and south of the territory, more than 550,000 people are housed in 92 centers managed by the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA).
According to the authority, more than 600 people have to share a toilet in one of these centers.