Hamas officials have disclosed that dozens of Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air raids while trying to flee the northern Gaza Strip, after the Israeli military ordered more than one million residents to evacuate in a demand rejected by the United Nations as ‘impossible’.
The media office of Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs the besieged Gaza Strip, said 70 people, mostly women and children, were killed in the air raids on cars leaving Gaza City. It noted that the vehicles were targeted in three places.
Africa Today News, New York gathered that thousands of Palestinian civilians began to flee to southern Gaza on Friday under a relentless barrage of air strikes after the Israeli military order although there were few signs of a mass exodus.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said any Palestinian who wants to “save their lives” must heed the order to move south as Israel prepares for an expected ground assault on the besieged coastal enclave.
About 1.1 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people live in the northern part of the strip, which includes Gaza City, the most populated urban area.
Several rights groups have denounced the order and warned that a potential forced transfer of the civilian population would be a violation of international law.
Many Palestinians said they would not heed the order.
‘The feeling is that there is no hope, that no one cares about Gaza or what’s happening to the people,’ Gaza resident Mansour Shouman reporters on Saturday morning.
“If we’re going to die here, we’re going to die in our homes. We’re going to die in the north or the south. We’re going to die with our heads up high, standing on our lands, standing with our rights and holding strong to our faith.”
The Gaza Ministry of Health said on Friday that at least 1,800 people — more than half of them women or people under the age of 18 — have been killed as Israel pounds the strip with air strikes that have levelled entire neighbourhoods.
Hamas has told people to stay put, and many of the enclave’s residents already believe there is nowhere safe they can go.
‘The noose around the civilian population in Gaza is tightening. How are 1.1 million people supposed to move across a densely populated war zone in less than 24 hours?’ UN aid chief Martin Griffiths wrote on social media.
‘Despite the occupation’s threats to shell; the decision has been made. We have not left and will not leave,’ the medical organisation Palestinian Red Crescent said in a social media post. ‘Our medics will carry on their humanitarian duties. We won’t leave people to face death alone.’
Israeli soldiers and tanks carried out their first ground assaults into Gaza on Friday, according to a military spokesman for Israel, after Hamas rebels launched a catastrophic attack on southern Israel on Saturday that left at least 1,300 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.
Hamas is also holding hostage more than 100 people, including Israelis and international nationals.
According to Israeli authorities, the soldiers in the early raids aimed to learn more about the captured people while also trying to target Palestinian rocket crews. The modest efforts are probably a lead-up to a planned ground assault.