Evacuation Order Brings New Chaos to Southeastern Gaza (2024)

‘Everything is difficult here’: Gazans describe the struggle of yet another evacuation.

Within the evacuation zone was the European Hospital in Khan Younis, which has served as a shelter for many people who have evacuated other areas. It ferried the majority of its medical staff and roughly 600 patients by ambulance to other hospitals.

On Tuesday morning, the Israeli military said it was unnecessary to leave the hospital, but many of the doctors and patients — scarred by previous Israeli raids on Gaza hospitals — were unwilling to take that risk, said Saleh al-Homs, a Gazan doctor who left the facility overnight. Israel has said its military operations at hospitals have sought to root out Hamas while minimizing harm to civilians.

“Why did they wait until the hospital was evacuated to issue that statement telling us not to evacuate?” said Dr. al-Homs. “People were terrified and desperate to get out.”

Jamal Azzam, a nurse who had been sheltering at European Hospital for six months, said that shelling had been intensifying since Monday night. When the evacuation began, he had to find his own route out and struggled to get a ride for his three children and their mattresses, clothes, water, canned food and a sack of flour.

He eventually found a free bus to take him to a spot packed with other displaced people. But that is where his luck appeared to diminish. At the hospital, the family had access to electricity and drinkable water, but they were now sweltering in a tent without power, access to drinking water or toilets.

“Everything is difficult here,” Mr. Azzam said. “The drinkable water I took with me is almost out, and I don’t know how I could get more,” he added.

Khaled Shurrab, 34, who had evacuated to Khan Younis just four days before, described a parade of people walking, or running, down the main coastal highway through the Gaza Strip. Others, he said had managed to get on trucks from the hospital.

He described trucks and cars stacked with people’s possessions, including water tanks, cooking gas cylinders, firewood and plastic sheeting. Some patients who were able to leave the hospital on their own were pushed in wheelchairs or in horse-drawn carriages, he added.

“It was really an indescribable, tough and harsh situation for me and my family,” Mr. Shurrab said, adding that evacuating was “beyond any word or any feeling. ”

Mr. Shurrab said that he had tried to hire a driver to evacuate him and his 17 family members back to Al-Mawasi, a coastal area where they had earlier been sheltering. He said he called more than 10 drivers to no avail. Two asked for as much as $350 to drive them less than five miles, he said.

“We had to pack everything back up,” he added. The family put up tents and built a makeshift toilet and water pipe on a beach in Khan Younis.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

A U.N. official says about 80 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced, and other news.

As Israel prepares to focus on ‘targeted raids,’ it is telling people to leave a large swath of Gaza.

For many Gazans who have been forced to flee again and again, the situation on the ground may not change much. Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to conduct days-long operations in neighborhoods they already conquered during the initial offensive in an effort to crack down on renewed insurgencies by Palestinian militants.

The trigger for the evacuation orders and overnight Israeli attacks around Khan Younis appeared to be a barrage of roughly 20 rockets that the military said were fired from the area toward Israeli cities by Palestinian militants on Monday. Israeli forces struck back overnight after “enabling civilians to evacuate from the area,” the military said.

The United Nations estimated that roughly 250,000 people would have to flee a large swath of southern Gaza to comply with the Israeli military orders. Scott Anderson, a senior U.N. official, said the calculation was based on prewar population data and anecdotal observations on how many people had returned to the city.

Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, said an evacuation at such a scale will only heighten the suffering of civilians who are facing food and water shortages. “People are left with the impossible choice of having to relocate, some most likely for the second or even the third time, to areas that have barely any spaces or services, or staying in areas where they know heavy fighting will take place,” he said.

For Gazans, recent operations intended to root out resurgent pockets of Hamas fighters have been far from low-intensity. Hundreds of Palestinian fighters were killed in fighting in areas of northern Gaza such as Shajaiye, Jabaliya and Zeitoun, according to the Israeli military. In Jabaliya, over 60,000 people fled their homes, according to the United Nations, returning to find widespread devastation.

Israeli forces largely withdrew from Khan Younis in April after months of fighting as they were gearing up to invade Rafah farther south. In the relative calm that followed, many of the city’s residents went back home, some living in tents next to the rubble of their houses.

Suzan Abu Daqqa, 59, returned to her house on the southern outskirts of Khan Younis last month. It was relatively unscathed by the heavy Israeli bombardment that had destroyed large parts of the city, and it still had running water.

But on Monday evening, Ms. Abu Daqqa and her family heard that the Israeli military had yet again ordered the evacuation of the city’s eastern outskirts. The now-familiar sound of artillery fire began, she said, prompting her to flee northwest with relatives.

Thousands of people filled the streets of the demolished city on Monday night as they headed toward the Mawasi area near the coast, which Israel has designated as a “safer zone.”

“How long can we keep being ordered: Leave and come back, leave and come back?” said Ms. Abu Daqqa.

On Tuesday, Khan Younis residents said most of the explosions they could hear appeared to be farther south, in Rafah, indicating that at least for now, the fighting in their city was less intense. The wide-scale evacuation order, however, could potentially herald a renewed military operation there.

Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, said Israeli troops would seek to slowly whittle away at Hamas’s remaining fighters in the area, a process he said could take years. Over time, Israel hopes to erode Hamas’s forces so thoroughly that Gaza will take fewer and fewer forces to control, he said.

“Every time the terrorists manage to constitute themselves, there will be a raid to deal with them,” said General Avivi, who leads the hawkish Israel Defense and Security Forum. “These raids can last a few days or a week at a time — generally no more than a few days — and then you withdraw."

General Avivi said for many Gazans, it would likely seem very similar to the current Israeli military campaign in the north.

“It won’t feel any different, save for perhaps in the forces applied and the number of troops,” he said.