Israel torments Palestinians in Gaza with endless displacement orders
Gaza City, Gaza - The Israeli military has issued so many "evacuation orders" in 10 months of war that many Gaza civilians no longer heed them, despairing of finding space or safety in tiny so-called "humanitarian" zones.
Over the first three weeks of August, the Israeli army sent out 13 evacuation orders via flyers dropped from planes, text messages, or social media.
They called on 250,000 Gazans, almost all of whom had been displaced multiple times already, to leave their place of shelter.
"The Israeli army will operate with force against terrorist organizations in this area. For your safety, we urge you to evacuate immediately," read one such order sent out Thursday in the southern province of Khan Yunis.
"Every time we arrive somewhere, we get a new evacuation order two days later. This is no way to live," Haitham Abdelaal told AFP.
Amneh Abu Daqqa (45) said she saw no point in moving again, so few were the options for safe haven.
"To go where?" asked the displaced mother of five. "I live on the street, literally. I don't have 500 shekels ($133) to rent a donkey-pulled cart. And I don't even know where I'd go," she said.
"There is nowhere safe, there are air strikes everywhere," Abu Daqqa added, a sentence that has become something of a refrain since Israel began its deadly onslaught.
Palestinians left with nowhere to go
The constant Israeli displacement of Palestinians also severely complicates relief distribution by UN agencies in a blockaded territory where aid barely trickles in via Israeli-held entry points.
Wednesday's evacuation order included "80 makeshift sites" but also offices and warehouses used by aid agencies, the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) said.
The orders also affected "three water wells... which serve tens of thousands of people," OCHA added.
Sometimes, the evacuation orders close roads, including the main Salah al-Din highway that runs the length of Gaza from north to south.
When portions of it are included in evacuation orders, transport becomes a headache.
Trucks must use the coast road that runs parallel to Salah al-Din, currently lined with makeshift camps that make movement "extremely slow and at times impossible," according to OCHA.
Nerman al-Bashniti, who lives in one such camp, told AFP: "When the Israeli army took the street that we were on, we ran to the sea, left our tent and all our belongings inside."
"Where will we go now? We can only throw ourselves into the sea and let the fish eat us."
Israel's mass displacement could amount to a war crime
In the early days of the war, the Israeli army touted its plans for the displaced.
After it ordered the evacuation of the north in the first week of the war, it published a map of Gaza broken down into several hundred numbered blocks, and declared the southern area of Al-Mawasi a "humanitarian zone" – which
To let Palestinians know precisely which areas will be targeted by military operations, its evacuation orders feature a dystopian map with numbered blocks varying in size depending on building density.
But the many blocks have made the orders confusing and sometimes even contradictory, such as on occasions when blocks listed for evacuation were not featured as to be evacuated on the accompanying maps.
From 3,107 inhabitants per square mile before the war, Al-Mawasi now houses between 77,800 to 88,000 per square mile, and its protected area shrank from 19 square miles to under 16, the UN calculated.
Most of Gaza is one extended built-up area, but Al-Mawasi was the location of most of the territory's Jewish settlements before Israel demolished them when it pulled out in 2005, leaving farmland fringed by the beach.
It has no infrastructure capable of dealing with even a fraction of the number of people squeezed in since the beginning of the war.
And despite being repeatedly referred to as a "humanitarian zone," Al-Mawasi has been repeatedly bombed and itself subject to "evacuation" orders.
UN experts have already warned that Israel's mass displacement of almost the entire population of Gaza may amount to a war crime.
Cover photo: AFP