Mass displacement in Gaza, with thousands unsure where to go

“There, there!” a little boy shouts, pointing to the sky.

Seconds later, as people scream for cover, a rocket comes into view and hits the ground with a huge explosion.

The target is an unidentified building, among canvas tents in Al Mawasi, the same designated humanitarian zone as where the Israeli The army orders people to go.

Asked by Sky News, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) did not say why this location was targeted on Wednesday morning.

Mawasi is a heaving mass of displaced people, with well over a million Gazans living in tents, temporary shelters or in the open, forcibly evacuated from their homes elsewhere in the Strip, often many times.

“We don’t know where to go. Seriously,” says one woman. ‘There is no safe place to go anymore.

‘There is no safe place, so we don’t know. Seriously, we have nothing. We’re losing everything we have.’

Strikes without explanation cause chaos

The numbers in the camp are growing daily as Israel’s military operation in the north increases Gaza continues.

However, despite IDF orders to move south, as many as 75,000 people remain in the north, some trapped, others unable or unwilling to move.

According to UN figures, more than a thousand Gazans have been killed in the area since the start of the operation on October 5, many of them by rocket attacks on residential buildings or temporary camps.

The IDF has provided very few details about this operation and its objectives, other than that it is undertaking a redeployment Hamas fighters.

Unlike the early months of the war, the IDF has published virtually no evidence supporting attacks on suspected Hamas targets in northern Gaza.

Rescue workers and medics say they are being denied access to many parts of the north. Stray dogs and cats eat abandoned bodies on the streets.

Aid agencies claim they are regularly denied access to Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, towns in the north.

The IDF blames Hamas and armed gangs for hijacking aid convoys and stealing the aid to resell it at high prices. Drone images prove this is happening. Much of Gaza is now lawless.

During a recent Israeli military entrenchment, some Gazans leaving the north told an Israeli television journalist that they blame Hamas for the conditions.

“Hamas injured and killed me,” a woman told the journalist. “May God settle the score with Hamas,” said another. Israeli soldiers stand nearby.

In October, a spokesperson for COGAT, the Israeli civil-military border authority that coordinates humanitarian aid, said aid deliveries were not needed in the northern cities because there was “no population” left.

Testimonies from several organizations on site and from photos taken for Sky News indicate otherwise.

“Living conditions across Gaza are unsuitable for human survival,” Joyce Msuya, a senior UN aid coordinator, recently told the UN Security Council.

“The daily cruelty we see in Gaza seems to know no bounds.”

‘The General’s Plan’

A former head of Israel’s National Security Council has drawn up a proposal to lay siege to northern Gaza with the aim of starving Hamas into surrender.

“The entire Gaza Strip must be closed and Israel must prevent any access of any supplies to Gaza,” retired general Giora Eiland told Sky News.

Island’s proposal, known as The General’s Plan, has become infamous.

It has been shown to senior IDF commanders and to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, but Eiland says it is not being acted upon.

Many observers disagree, saying the IDF’s actions in northern Gaza now bear remarkable similarities to the controversial General Plan.

He said: “I would let everyone leave, even Hamas fighters, but after two weeks I would do one simple thing: I would stop the flow of fuel, food and other important materials to this part of northern Gaza… this is the most effective way to conquer northern Gaza.”

Eiland suggests that aid organizations and NGOs help evacuate civilians from the combat zone; it is an unrealistic proposal because the aid organizations would refuse on the grounds that they would become complicit in IDF actions.

The Israeli government denies there are plans to permanently reoccupy northern Gaza, but a series of comments from senior officials in recent weeks suggest otherwise and bulldozers are systematically tearing down the ruins of many of the buildings still standing.

In early November, an Israeli general was recorded telling journalists that “the intention is not to allow the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.” The IDF news agency claimed his words were taken out of context.

Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, recently published an editorial accusing the IDF of ethnic cleansing in the north.

One of the correspondents reported: “The area seems to have been hit by a natural disaster.”

The recently fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the hostage families that “there is nothing left to do in Gaza.”

“The main results have been achieved,” he added, but ceasefire efforts have stalled and there is no sign of a ceasefire in the short term.