Thousands of people facing Israeli airstrikes in Gaza have been forced to abandon plans to comply with Israeli evacuation orders telling them to move to a designated “safe humanitarian zone” because there is no space for them there.
At the weekend the Israeli military told residents of multiple neighbourhoods in and around the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah to leave their homes before planned attacks and go to the narrow strip of coast around the small town of al-Mawasi that was designated earlier in the war to receive displaced people.
“My uncles and father tried to find a new safer place to move our family to but their efforts did not succeed yet as all spaces within the safe zone are occupied,” said a 34-year-old woman who has been living with 16 relatives on the edge of the designated safe area, who did not want to be named.
Humanitarian officials confirmed the overcrowding in the humanitarian zone was dissuading those given evacuation orders by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from leaving, despite the dangers of remaining.
“There’s just no space and people know that, so they stay where they are. You can’t get hold of tents, so even if you found somewhere, it would be difficult to get any shelter, and conditions there are terrible,” said a UN official based in Gaza. “Some people refuse to move [to al-Mawasi] because they just don’t want to leave their homes but most because they’ll have nowhere to live if they go there.”
The vast majority of Gaza’s population has been displaced, often multiple times, and 86% of the territory has been put under evacuation orders by the Israeli military, according to the UN. Israeli officials say the orders are aimed at reducing civilian casualties and blame Hamas for using people as human shields.
Several hundred thousand people have packed into al-Mawasi since the beginning of the conflict despite minimal provision there of even basic services. Water supply is inadequate, there is almost no sanitation, healthcare is rudimentary and infectious diseases are on the rise. Aid groups fear the outbreak of diseases such as polio.
“The situation there is just getting worse and worse,” the UN official said.
A UN bulletin published on Monday said that since the start of August the Israeli military had issued nine evacuation orders that were affecting an estimated 213,000 people across Gaza. The bulletin said the population of Gaza, which was 2.3 million before the war, was “increasingly concentrated” within the Israeli-designated zone in al-Mawasi, with 30,000 to 34,000 people crammed into each square kilometre, compared with an estimated 1,200 people per square kilometre before October 2023.
Since a reduction ordered by Israeli military last month, the area of the humanitarian zone has shrunk by a fifth, to 40 sq km – just 11% of the Gaza Strip.
“This reduction in space, combined with overcrowding, heightened insecurity, inadequate and overstretched infrastructure, ongoing hostilities, and limited services is exacerbating the dire humanitarian situation for the hundreds of thousands of people forced to live inside it,” the UN said.
The IDF said the reduction was because the eastern part of the zone had been used for “significant terrorist activity and rocket fire toward the state of Israel”. “The adjustment is being carried out in accordance with precise intelligence indicating that Hamas has embedded terrorist infrastructure in the area defined as the Humanitarian Area,” it said.
On Monday, the IDF retrieved the bodies of six hostages held in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict from a tunnel that it said was “under an area previously designated as part of the humanitarian area”.
A series of airstrikes within the humanitarian zone have also convinced many people in Gaza who receive evacuation orders that they are better off remaining where they are.
One airstrike in al-Mawasi in July may have killed Mohammed Deif, the most senior Hamas military commander in Gaza and one of the architects of the attacks into southern Israel that triggered the conflict, but also caused at least 92 deaths and wounded more than 300, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
“No place is safe,” said Yussef Abu Taimah, from the town of al-Qarara in Khan Younis, as he prepared to relocate his family for the fourth time after the Israeli order.
Some cannot move to al-Mawasi – or anywhere else – because they have no fuel. Siham Bahgat, 24, said her family of eight had tried to flee their tented camp on the edge of the humanitarian zone on Monday afternoon after they heard shooting nearby. “We loaded all our important stuff but we could not get very far because we ran out of petrol, which has been very difficult to get for months, so we decided to stay and sleep the night where we were,” she said.
The Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and 250 hostages being taken to Gaza by the militant Islamist organisation. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has so far killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.
