On Friday morning, more than a million people in northern Gaza found themselves facing a terrible dilemma.
Should they follow the 400,000 friends, relatives and neighbours who had already fled their homes amid Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes and its warning that almost half of the enclave’s 2.3 million people should evacuate the area for their “own safety” ahead of the expected ground assault?
Or should they heed Hamas’s call to stay put and stand firm against what it called “this disgusting psychological war waged by the occupation”?
Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Gaza City, broke down in tears as she tried to make sense of what is going on.
“Forget about food, forget about electricity, forget about fuel,” she said. “The only concern now is just if you’ll make it – if you’re going to live.”
The Palestinian health ministry said that 1,799 people have been killed and more than 6,400 injured since Israel began striking Gaza last Saturday. The UN estimates that more than 423,000 people have already fled their homes in the territory – many of them making for the area that Israel is now telling them to leave.
By Friday morning, many people were cramming their belongings into suitcases and plastic bags, scooping up their children and beginning to move south.
“Right now, I’m leaving what I thought was the safest place I could go to,” said Rama Abu Amra, a student who had fled several times with her family across Gaza City since the bombardments began. The sound of panicked crowds was audible in the background as she spoke.
“We’re not safe at all, we’re constantly under attack. I don’t know, I’m just praying to God to protect us, to protect our homes, mine is really under attack. I might not find it again.”
She said she was saying goodbye to everything that she loved: her home; her room; her childhood memories, even her box of university supplies.
“I never thought this would happen,” added Abu Amra. “We’ve faced many wars before, many escalations before, but even those were easier.”
But this time, she said, there was simply nowhere to run to. “We just don’t know what to do. We hope to stay alive, because I really don’t know if I will or not. Just pray for us. We have no internet, no water and no food. No connection, everything is so hard. We have never lived something like this.”
Others, however, had made up their minds that there would be no repeat of what Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe – of 1948, when 700,000 people were expelled or fled from their homes in the war surrounding the creation of the Israeli state.
Inside Shifa hospital, the largest of Gaza’s 13 public hospitals, a man arrived to check on dozens of friends and relatives who had been brought from a building in Beach refugee camp that had been bombed by Israel. “I survived – I don’t know why I survived,” he told reporters. “It is so that I [can] tell the enemy, America, Europe and the world that this Palestinian people will not be defeated. They think there will be another displacement, or that we may go to Egypt. Nonsense.”
With that, he went to the morgue to try to identify his dead relatives.
Despite the bombings and the mass displacements, Hamas urged the people of Gaza not to move. Once again, the spectre of the Nakba was invoked.
“We tell the people of northern Gaza and from Gaza City, stay put in your homes, and your places,” said Eyad al-Bozom, a spokesperson for Hamas’s interior ministry. “By carrying out massacres against the civilians, the occupation wants to displace us once again from our land. The 1948 displacement will not happen. We will die and we will not leave.”
Gaza’s health ministry said it would be impossible to evacuate the many wounded from hospitals, adding that hospital staff would not act in accordance with Israel’s warning.
“We have a duty and a humanitarian mission, and we cannot evacuate hospitals and leave the wounded and sick to die,” said a spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra. In the event of severe Israeli strikes, he added, there was simply nowhere else in the Gaza Strip to take and treat patients.
That view was echoed by the World Health Organization (WHO). “There are severely ill people whose injuries mean their only chances of survival is being on life support, such as mechanical ventilators,” said the WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević. “So moving those people is a death sentence. Asking health workers to do so is beyond cruel.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society – four of whose paramedics have been killed in Gaza in recent days – also said it would stay in Gaza.
“The decision has been made,” it said in a statement posted on Instagram. “We have not and will not leave. Our paramedics will continue to provide their humanitarian missions until the last moment. We will not leave people to face death alone.”
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it was not evacuating its schools, where hundreds of thousands have taken shelter. But it has relocated its headquarters to southern Gaza, according to the spokesperson Juliette Touma.
Pressed by reporters on whether the Israeli army would protect hospitals, UN shelters and other civilian locations, a military spokesperson described the areas as “a war zone”.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari for the Israel Defense Forces said: “If Hamas prevents residents from evacuating, the responsibility lies with them.”
Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, said Israel’s warning was simply not effective and called on world leaders to speak up. “The roads are rubble, fuel is scarce, and the main hospital is in the evacuation zone,” he said. “This order does not alter Israel’s obligations in military operations to never target civilians and take all the measures it can to minimise harm to them.”
The UN’s human rights office called for restraint on both sides, pointing out that 2,700 people, including civilians, had been killed since Hamas’s assault on Israel almost a week ago. It voiced fears that senior Israeli military officials were giving the impression that obeying international humanitarian law had become “optional rather than compulsory” in the retaliatory strikes.
“We urge Palestinian armed groups to halt the use of inherently indiscriminate projectiles, which violate international humanitarian law, as well as attacks directed against civilians,” said Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“And we urge Israel to ensure full respect for international humanitarian and human rights law in any and all military operations. Airstrikes and artillery strikes have already led to the destruction of large parts of densely populated neighbourhoods in Gaza, and rhetoric from high-level officials raises concerns that a message is being sent to the members of the Israeli Defence Forces that international humanitarian law has become optional rather than compulsory.”
Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
