Thousands of Palestinians continue to flee the devastated streets of Gaza City and seek refuge further south after Israel issued an injunction a week after the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement as it prepares a ground offensive to destroy Hamas.
The army, which responded with intense attacks on the Gaza Strip, announced Saturday that it had “liquidated” a senior Hamas military official on the seventh day of the war that has already left thousands dead. This official, Mourad Abou Mourad, is, in her opinion, responsible for “a large part of the murderous offensive” against Israel.
The army had announced the previous day that it had carried out ground attacks on the Palestinian territory in which 5,540 houses were “destroyed”, according to the UN.
Nearly 3,750 more homes were so damaged that they were uninhabitable, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) added on Saturday.
“This is just the beginning” of Israeli operations in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Friday.
The Israeli army confirmed on Saturday that it had identified “more than 120 civilians” being held captive in Gaza, including about 150 hostages who had been kidnapped and threatened with execution by Hamas. Hundreds of people are still missing and their bodies are still being identified.
“We are likely to develop into further significant combat operations,” emphasized Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conricus.
At least 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians, have been killed since the attack, which has left Israel traumatized compared to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
About 1,900 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 614 children, have died in the Gaza Strip, a small, impoverished and besieged area between Israel and Egypt, according to local authorities.
Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel and has been in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, said Friday that 13 hostages, “including foreigners,” had been killed in Israeli strikes.
The Islamist group that Israel has vowed to “annihilate” had already announced the deaths of four hostages in the bombings.
“Humanitarian catastrophe”
The Israeli army on Saturday welcomed a “significant movement” of Gaza civilians evacuating to the south, but accused Hamas of trying to block those withdrawals.
The day before, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused Hamas of using the population as a “protective shield”.
The Islamist movement rejected this evacuation call, which affects around 1.1 million residents out of a total of 2.4 million.
Calls to prevent a “humanitarian catastrophe” are increasing around the world.
“Even wars have rules,” reminded UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calling for “immediate” humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip.
He described a “health system on the verge of collapse” and “overcrowded morgues.”
US President Joe Biden assured that “the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is a “priority,” and several NGOs called for the opening of humanitarian corridors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that a possible ground attack would result in “completely unacceptable civilian casualties.”
The evacuation of Gaza civilians demanded by Israel is “completely impossible to implement,” said the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, on Saturday.
Saudi Arabia, which expressed “its categorical rejection of calls for forced relocation” and condemned “the ongoing bombing of defenseless civilians,” announced on Saturday that it was suspending talks on possible normalization with Israel.
Tensions are also high on the country’s northern border, where the Israeli army announced this morning that it had killed “several terrorists” trying to enter from Lebanon.
That night, it said it attacked a Hezbollah target in southern Lebanon in response to an aerial “infiltration” and shooting at one of its drones.
Pro-Iranian Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, said on Friday it was “fully ready” to intervene against Israel “at the right moment.”
A Portal video journalist was killed and six other journalists from AFP, Portal and Al-Jazeera were injured in bombings in southern Lebanon on Friday.
In the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967, at least 16 Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli forces during rallies in solidarity with the Gaza Strip.
Thousands of people also demonstrated in Beirut, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Bahrain on Friday in support of the Palestinians.
At dawn on October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest period, hundreds of Hamas fighters entered Israel in vehicles and by air from Gaza.
They killed more than a thousand civilians and unleashed terror under rocket fire on a scale not seen since Israel’s founding in 1948. According to authorities, around 270 people were killed at a music festival.
Yossi Landau, who has worked for the NGO Zaka for 33 years, which specializes in searching for corpses, witnessed a horror scene in Beeri, a city where around a hundred people were killed. He saw a woman whose stomach was “torn open, where a baby lay, still attached to the umbilical cord, stabbed.”
After the attack, the Israeli army said it had recovered the bodies of 1,500 Palestinian fighters.
Flee south or stay?
The Israeli army, which is shelling the Gaza Strip in response, called on all Gaza civilians to “evacuate their homes in the south for their own safety.”
Thousands of them are fleeing with their backpacks by all means, on foot, piled on trailers, carts, on motorcycles, by car, through rubble-strewn streets lined with destroyed buildings.
Here a child holds his pillow tightly in his hand. There, a woman packed everything she could save into a bag slung over her shoulder.
Leaflets in Arabic dropped by Israeli drones urge residents to leave their homes “immediately.”
The Gaza Strip, an area of 362 square kilometers, has been subject to an Israeli land, air and sea blockade since Hamas came to power there. Egypt controls its only access to the world, the Rafah border crossing, which is currently closed.
The enclave has been under a “full siege” since October 9 and is now deprived of water, electricity and food supplies because Israel has cut it off. And the sound of explosions is incessant.
“How long will we live with bombs and death everywhere?” says Oum Hossam, 29, with tear-stained cheeks as he seeks refuge with his four children after his house was destroyed.
Other residents refuse to leave, for lack of money or because they won’t give in: “The enemy wants to terrorize us and force us into exile, but we will resist,” says one of them, Abou Azzam.
According to the United Nations, more than 423,000 Palestinians have already left their homes.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas compared such an “expulsion” to a “second Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic), the name given to the flight of some 760,000 Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel.