Israel’s military on Friday directed the hundreds of thousands of residents in Gaza City to evacuate ‘for their own safety and protection,’ ahead of a feared Israeli ground offensive.
The announcement followed a UN spokesperson’s claim that the military directed an evacuation for all of northern Gaza, a region that is home to 1.1 million people – about half of the territory’s population – within 24 hours.
The directive, which comes on the seventh day of the war after a deadly Hamas attack, directs residents to flee deeper south into the Gaza Strip, a narrow coastal territory. Israel’s directive charged that Hamas militants were hiding in tunnels under the city.
It could be the strongest response yet to Hamas´ shock assault Saturday and smaller attacks since have killed more than 1,500 people in Israel, including 247 soldiers – a toll unseen in Israel for decades.
The ensuing Israeli bombardment has killed more than 1,530 people in Gaza, according to authorities on both sides.
Israel’s military on Friday directed the evacuation of northern Gaza, a region that is home to 1.1 million people – about half of the territory’s population – within 24 hours, a UN spokesman said. Pictured: Palestinian children wounded in Israeli strikes are brought to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Wednesday
Israel says roughly 1,500 Hamas militants were killed inside Israel, and that hundreds of the dead in Gaza are Hamas members. Thousands have been wounded on both sides.
Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, spokesman of the Israel Defense Forces (lDF) said in a video update Friday that the evacuations were a ‘humanitarian step.’
‘The IDF calls for the evacuation of all civilians from Gaza City from their homes southwards for their own safety and protection and to move to the area south of the River Gaza.’
‘The Hamas terrorist organization waged a war against the state of Israel and Gaza City is an area where military operations are taking place,’ he continued.
‘This evacuation is for your own safety. You will be able to return Gaza City only when another announcement permitting it is made.’
Conricus claimed the IDF has distributed a map showing Gaza City residents where to migrate and warned they should not go near any security fences.
‘Do not approach the border, only go south,’ he added.
This could signal an impending ground offensive, though the Israeli military has not yet confirmed such an appeal. On Thursday it said that while it was preparing, a decision has not yet been made.
The order, delivered to the U.N., comes as Israel presses an offensive against Hamas militants. U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric called the order ‘impossible’ without ‘devastating humanitarian consequences.’
Earlier, the Israeli military pulverized the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, prepared for a possible ground invasion and said its complete siege of the territory – which has left Palestinians desperate for food, fuel and medicine – would remain in place until Hamas militants free some 150 hostages taken during a grisly weekend incursion.
As the full scale of the horrors of the weekend were coming into focus, Israel’s military was ramping up preparations for a ground invasion, and Hamas was continuing to launch rockets into Israel.
‘Now is the time for war,’ said Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, as his country amassed tanks near the Gaza Strip.
Seeking to build support for its response, Israel’s government showed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO defense ministers graphic images of children and civilians they said Hamas had killed in a weekend rampage in Israel.
Blinken said they showed a baby ‘riddled with bullets,’ soldiers beheaded and young people burned in their cars.
‘It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way,’ he said. ‘It’s really beyond anything that we can comprehend.’
Israel has vowed to retaliate for the attack – the deadliest by Palestinian militants in Israeli history.
Like others across the globe, Blinken urged Israel to show restraint, but he also reiterated America’s support, saying: ‘We will always be there by your side.’
On Friday he was due to meet King Abdullah and Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in Jordan as part of a Middle East tour aimed at stopping spillover from the war.
An armed Palestinian militant leading a man during the Supernova music festival
An armed Palestinian militant is seen walking around the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel
Sitting on the back of a terrorist’s motorcycle, her outstretched arms pointing towards her helpless boyfriend, student Noa Argamani pleads for her life
Aftermath: Burnt-out and abandoned cars where revellers tried to escape the onslaught
At least 260 were killed in the massacre while many are still missing – either dead or taken hostage by the bloodthirsty militants
America’s top diplomat, Blinken planned to visit key U.S. allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates – some with influence on Hamas, an Islamist group backed by Iran.
Halevi said lessons would be drawn from the security failures around Gaza that enabled the attack.
‘We will learn, investigate, but now is the time for war,’ he said.
The U.S. military is placing no conditions on its security assistance to Israel, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, adding Washington expected Israel’s military to ‘do the right things’ in prosecuting its war against Hamas.
Austin was due in Israel on Friday and planned to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hamas called on Palestinians to rise up on Friday in protest at Israel’s bombardment of the enclave, urging Palestinians to march to East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and clash with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank.
Public broadcaster Kan said the Israeli death toll had risen to more than 1,300.
The American death toll rose to 27.
Scores of Israeli and foreign hostages were taken back to Gaza; Israel said it had identified 97 of them.
Israel has responded so far by putting Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, under siege and launching a bombing campaign that destroyed whole neighborhoods.
‘Not a single electricity switch will be flipped on, not a single faucet will be turned on and not a single fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home,’ Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz said on social media.
Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters Thursday that forces ‘are preparing for a ground maneuver’ should political leaders order one.
A ground offensive in Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas and where the population is densely packed into a sliver of land only 25 miles long, would likely bring even higher casualties on both sides in brutal house-to-house fighting.
As Israel pounds Gaza from the air, Hamas militants have fired thousands of rockets into Israel.
Amid concerns that the fighting could spread in the region, Syrian state media reported that Israeli airstrikes on Thursday put two Syrian international airports out of service.
The relentless barrage on Gaza – which the military said has so far involved 6,000 munitions – left Palestinians running through streets, carrying their belongings and looking for safety
A strike Thursday afternoon in the Jabaliya refugee camp took down a residential building on families sheltering inside, killing at least 45 people, Gaza’s Interior Ministry said.
At least 23 of the dead were under the age of 18, including a month-old child, according to a list of the casualties.
The home belonging to the al-Shihab family was packed with relatives who had fled bombing in other areas. Neighbors said a second house was hit at the same time, but the toll was not immediately known.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘We can´t flee because anywhere you go, you are bombed,’ one neighbor, Khalil Abu Yahia, said. ‘You need a miracle to survive here.’
The number of people forced from their homes by the airstrikes soared 25% in a day, reaching 423,000 out of a population of 2.3 million, the U.N. said Thursday. Most crowded into U.N.-run schools.
Families were cutting down to one meal a day, said Rami Swailem, a 34-year-old lecturer at al-Azhar University, who had 32 relatives sheltering in his home. Water stopped coming to the building two days ago, and they have rationed what´s left in a tank on the roof.
Alaa Younis Abuel-Omrain has been staying in a U.N. school after a strike on her home killed eight members of her family – her mother, aunt, a sister, a brother and his wife and their three children. Most bakeries stopped producing bread for lack of electricity.
‘Even if there is food in some areas, we can´t get to it because of strikes,’ she said.
On Wednesday, Gaza´s only power station ran out of fuel and shut down, leaving only lights powered by scattered private generators.
Hospitals, overwhelmed by a constant stream of wounded and running out of supplies, have only a few days worth of fuel before their power cuts off, aid officials say.
‘Without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues,’ said Fabrizio Carboni, regional director of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Newborn incubators, kidney dialysis machines, X-ray equipment and more, are all dependent on power, he said.
Ambulance crews carrying bodies to the morgue at Gaza´s biggest hospital, Shifa, found no space left.
Dozens of full body bags were lined up in the hospital parking lot. Fourteen health facilities have been damaged in strikes, health officials said Thursday.
With Israel sealing off the territory, the only way in or out is through the crossing with Egypt at Rafah, but Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday that airstrikes on Rafah have prevented it from operating.
Egypt has been trying to convince Israel and the United States to allow aid and fuel through the crossing.
Israel is employing a new tactic of leveling whole neighborhoods, rather than just individual buildings.
Hecht, the military spokesman, said targeting decisions were based on intelligence on locations being used by Hamas and that civilians were warned.
‘Right now, we are focused on taking out their senior leadership,’ Hecht said. The military said strikes have hit Hamas´ elite Nukhba forces, including command centers used by the fighters in Saturday´s attack, and the home of a senior Hamas naval operative used to store weapons.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to ‘crush’ Hamas after the militants stormed into the country´s south on Saturday and massacred hundreds of people, including killings of children in their homes and young people at a music festival.
Netanyahu said Hamas’ atrocities included beheading soldiers and raping women, descriptions that could not immediately be independently confirmed.
Amid grief and demands for vengeance among the Israeli public, the government is under intense pressure to topple Hamas rather than continuing to try to bottle it up in Gaza.
In a video released Thursday, civilian Hamas figures defended the group´s rampage and decried the civilian deaths in Gaza from six days of Israeli airstrikes.
The solemn video lacked the bravado of a recording aired Saturday by Hamas´s military wing that hailed ‘the greatest battle’ as the massacres were still taking place.
Basem Naim, a former Hamas government minister, said that in the ‘swift collapse’ of the Israeli military on Saturday, ‘chaos prevailed and civilians found themselves in the middle of the confrontation.’
The claim is contradicted by countless videos and survivor accounts of Hamas militants deliberately targeting and killing civilians in Israel.
Naim added that there would be no action to free the 150 captives taken back into Gaza while Israel’s operation continued.
Israel was a nation in mourning. At a funeral for a 25-year-old woman killed with at least 260 other people at a desert rave, and at another service for a slain Israeli soldier, mourners sat cross-legged on the ground next to caskets, wailing or quietly weeping.
In Gaza, too, mourners buried families together in shrouds. At one funeral, they placed the battered body of a little girl in the arms of her slain father.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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