Number of Gazans fleeing to southern Strip rises sharply, UN says
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports 15,000 people used evacuation routes set up by IDF on Tuesday, triple the number of the day before
The pace of Palestinian civilians fleeing the combat zone in northern Gaza has picked up as Israel’s air and ground campaign there intensifies, UN monitors said Wednesday.
About 15,000 people fled on Tuesday, compared to 5,000 on Monday and 2,000 on Sunday, said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The civilians are able to move during a four-hour window set daily by the Israel Defense Forces that assures safe passage from Gaza City and its surroundings to the south. Most of those fleeing are children, the elderly and people with disabilities, the UN agency said. Many arrived on foot with minimal belongings.
War erupted when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists breached the Gaza border on October 7, slaughtering around 1,400 people — mainly civilians — in communities in southern Israel. They also took at least 240 hostages to the Strip, including at least 30 children.
Having suffered the worst single-day casualties in its history, Israel has vowed to end Hamas’s control of the territory and eliminate the terror threat that has constantly emanated from the enclave for the better part of two decades.
COGAT, the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories, shared a brief video on X on Tuesday that it said showed the movement of civilians southward, many of whom could be seen carrying white flags and holding their hands in the air, passing by an Israeli tank.
????Happening now: Thousands pass through the evacuation corridor the @IDF opened for civilians in northern Gaza to move southwards. pic.twitter.com/lq7ZpfMiM4
— COGAT (@cogatonline) November 7, 2023
The IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, Avichay Adraee, also posted the short clip, telling residents on Wednesday that Salah a-Din road would again be open for Palestinians to evacuate to southern Gaza between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.
For weeks Israeli authorities have been urging civilians in Gaza to move to the southern part of the Strip, as its ground and air operations against have been mostly concentrated in the north, even though Israel also routinely strikes what it says are terror targets in the south. Israel has dropped fliers in the northern Strip urging people to leave and providing maps of evacuation routes.
Israel is focusing its operations on Gaza City, which was home to some 650,000 people before the war and where the military says Hamas has its central command and a vast labyrinth of tunnels.
Over 70% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have already fled their homes, but the growing numbers making their way south point to an increasingly desperate situation in and around Gaza’s largest city, which has come under heavy Israeli bombardment.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians remain in the combat area, many sheltering at hospitals or UN schools. Some said they were deterred from moving south because of dire humanitarian conditions in the evacuation zone and ongoing Israeli airstrikes.
Hamas has accused the IDF of firing on or striking convoys of those evacuating, charges that Israel has strongly denied. The IDF instead has provided evidence that Hamas operatives are trying to prevent civilians from moving south, setting up roadblocks and purportedly even firing on convoys.
On Saturday, when Salah a-Din road was open for a humanitarian corridor, the IDF said Hamas took advantage of the situation and launched mortars and anti-tank guided missiles at troops working to open up the road for civilians.
In an interview Monday evening on ABC, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas was “using their civilians as human shields, and while we are asking the Palestinian civilian population to leave the war zone, they are preventing them at gunpoint.”
The Hamas-run health ministry claims that more than 10,300 Gazans have been killed since the start of the war, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes both Hamas terror operatives as well as those killed by failed Palestinian rocket launches at Israel. Hamas has been accused of artificially inflating the death toll, and does not distinguish between civilians and terror operatives.
Israel says that it tries to minimize civilian casualties and accuses Hamas of using noncombatants as human shields while embedding fighters and military infrastructure in homes, schools, mosques and hospitals.
The Times of Israel Community.