Gaza’s evacuees are racing south with nowhere safe to go

Editor’s note (October 16th): This piece has been updated with the latest numbers of hostages taken from Israel.

IN JUST NINE days of war Hassan Abu Selmiyeh has already been displaced three times. First he moved to his brother’s house in Shati, a crowded refugee camp by the sea in northern Gaza. When that area felt unsafe he left for his daughter’s place inland. Then, on October 13th, he heard that Israel had called on the entire population of northern Gaza, more than 1m people, to flee south (see map). He thought it was a rumour—until he saw his neighbours start to leave.

With no taxis to be found, the 66-year-old made his way south on foot, walking 10km amid what he describes as “constant bombing” by the Israeli army. “It was devastating, whole neighbourhoods were wiped out, whole buildings were demolished,” he says. “It looked like one of Ukraine’s massacred cities. Gaza has turned into a ghost town.”

Since 2007, when Hamas, a militant Islamist group, took control of Gaza, war has been a tragic constant for the territory’s more than 2m inhabitants. They have lived through two big conflicts with Israel and numerous smaller ones. But this war, Gazans say, is unlike anything they have seen before. It is not just that the bombing is fiercer and the death toll higher; it is also that there is no electricity, barely any fuel and little to eat or drink.

The war started on October 7th after Hamas militants crossed into Israel and murdered more than 1,300 people, most of them civilians. Israel started air strikes almost immediately and placed Gaza under a total siege, allowing no shipments of food, fuel or other essentials to enter. It later began small special-forces raids into the territory and is preparing for a larger ground offensive. Nearly 2,400 people have already been killed in Gaza, exceeding the Palestinian death toll from the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2014.

Even before the Israeli evacuation order more than 423,000 people, one-fifth of the population, had been displaced. The Hamas government says that 5,540 homes have been destroyed, with another 3,743 so badly damaged that they are uninhabitable. Those figures have not been updated in several days; the number is almost certainly higher now.

About two-thirds of those already displaced sought shelter at 102 United Nations schools across the territory. Thousands more hid in churches, in the belief they are less likely to be targeted than mosques. Even more ran to hospitals, where they filled corridors and car parks. “The hospital is completely overrun with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of internally displaced families,” says Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a surgeon at Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest. “You can barely walk between the different buildings.”

Untold numbers have now moved south. Some piled onto the beds of trucks or into carts pulled by horses and donkeys. Others walked. The flight evoked memories of the nakba (“catastrophe”), the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians that accompanied the founding of Israel in 1948. Several people in Gaza say that Hamas has tried to deter civilians from fleeing south, though others say they faced no opposition from the group.

Tens of thousands of people have descended on Khan Younis, the first major city in the south. It might be safer than the north once Israel starts its ground offensive—but it is not safe. Samir Tabash, a resident of Khan Younis, says his family had just finished morning prayers when their street was bombed. “In an instant, the windows and walls of our apartment collapsed,” he says. “We saw the blood all over the kids. The house turned into one open-air room as all the walls collapsed” (they all survived).

Water has become the most pressing concern for many families. Israel has cut off its supply to Gaza. The strip’s three desalination plants are offline and stocks of bottled water are low. Taps trickle for only a few minutes a day, if at all; with sewage-treatment plants shut down for lack of electricity, what comes out is contaminated.

Doctors fear that water-borne diseases, such as cholera, will spread. Some people have resorted to drinking dirty water from wells on farms. “It has become a matter of life and death,” says Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency, which helps Palestinian refugees. “People will start dying of severe dehydration.”

Food is scarce, too. Palestinians report empty shelves in supermarkets (“not a single can”, says one), while bakeries have only a few days of flour left. Crops are dying in fields and livestock in barns. Hospitals are running out of medical supplies and most have less than 48 hours’ worth of fuel to run their generators.

Israeli officials say there will be no easing of the siege unless Hamas releases 199 hostages (including at least a dozen children) it dragged across the border during the rampage. On October 15th, though, Israel did say it had turned on the water pipes to southern Gaza. Aid is piling up in Egypt, which also shares a border with Gaza. Arab countries and international organisations have flown 100 tonnes of supplies to the city of el-Arish, around 45km west of Gaza. But Israel, which by mutual agreement must consent to shipments of goods via Egypt, has not agreed to let them in. Meanwhile, Egypt refuses to allow Palestinians to leave Gaza to escape the fighting.

As for Hamas, it offers little beyond urging Gazans to remain steadfast. In a speech on October 14th Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s leader, said that “the people of Gaza are deeply rooted in their land and will not leave”. He delivered those words not from Gaza but from Doha, the comfortable capital of Qatar, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. ■