Thousands of northern Gaza residents are fleeing south by car or on foot, heeding Israel’s warnings but wondering “where to go” as bombings continue in the enclave.
“How long will we live under bombs and with death everywhere?” says Um Hosam, 29, with her four children and tears streaming down her face.
Since Hamas launched the attack on Saturday that killed at least 1,300 people, Israel has been relentlessly bombarding the Palestinian enclave ruled by the Islamist movement, where at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, a third of them children, according to local health sources.
Um Hosam left her neighborhood under bomb attacks three days ago and took refuge with relatives. “They told me that my house was completely destroyed,” he says.
“We don’t have a house, everything in Gaza is destroyed. Where are the Arabs? You have to protect us, enough is enough!” continues the man, who will be moving again in less than a week.
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The issue of displacement is crucial in the Gaza Strip, where more than 80% of the roughly 2.4 million residents are refugees who left or were expelled from their cities when Israel was founded in 1948.
Those painful memories resurfaced when the Israeli army dropped leaflets urging residents to “immediately” move to the southern Gaza Strip, a narrow 362-square-kilometer area bordering Israel to the north and east; to the west with the Mediterranean; and in the south with Egypt.
The United Nations had previously reported that the Israeli army had given orders to evacuate 1.1 million residents to the south within the next 24 hours. The deadline was extended by the armed forces.
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Since then, the streets have been full of families carrying some belongings in plastic bags, AFP reporters said. A child holds her pillow tightly in her hand, a woman packs everything that fits into a leather bag that she carries on her shoulder.
There are also residents who have chosen to stay, either because of a lack of transportation, because they don’t know anyone who can take them in in the south, or because they refuse to leave a land that Israel could retake.
Hamas, which has ruled the enclave since 2007, called on residents to defy Israel’s order, as did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who governs the occupied West Bank. This new expulsion is “a second Nakba,” the “catastrophe” that the creation of the State of Israel represents for the Palestinians, Abas explained.
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“The enemy is fierce and wants to terrorize us and force us into exile, but we will resist,” Abu Azzam, a resident of the northern Gaza Strip, told AFP, saying he was determined to stay there.
Mohammed Khaled, 43, also decided to stay. “What does the world want from us? “I’m already a refugee in Gaza and they want me to leave?” he shouts.
“What are we going to do in Rafah?”, a large city at the other end of the Gaza Strip, on the border with Egypt, he asks.
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“Do you want us to sleep on the street with our children? I refuse! I don’t want this undignified life!” “There is no safe place, so we don’t know where to go,” explains Mohammed Abu Ali, from the refugee camp in Shati, the oldest of Gaza, in the north of the Strip.
“Our children live among ruins and we have neither water nor food,” says Abu Ali.
After the Hamas attack on Saturday, Israel imposed a state of siege in the Gaza Strip, banning the import of goods and fuel and cutting off water and electricity supplies.
“We have come to seek refuge at UNRWA,” the U.N. agency responsible for the nearly six million Palestinian refugees in Middle Eastern countries. “And in front of your offices I formally ask the UN: Where do we go now?”
But even UNRWA chose the southern road and relocated its operations center and staff there.
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