UN aid worker says little space left for displaced Gazans to go
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Thousands of people, displaced many times already, are on the run again and there is no guarantee a destination will be safe.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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GAZA - Many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have followed Israeli army evacuation orders and sought safety in designated areas, only to find there is little space left in the densely populated enclave, a United Nations humanitarian team leader said on Dec 25.
Ms Gemma Connell, deployed in Gaza for several weeks now, described what she called a “human chess board” in which thousands of people, displaced many times already,
The United States, Israel’s staunchest ally in its war against Hamas,
“People were heading up south with mattresses and all of their belongings in vans and in trucks and in cars in order to try and find somewhere safe,” said Ms Connell, who on Dec 25 visited the Deir al-Balah neighbourhood in central Gaza.
“I have spoken to many people. There is so little space left here in Rafah that people just don’t know where they will go, and it really feels like people being moved around a human chessboard because there is an evacuation order somewhere.
“People flee that area into another area. But they are not safe there,” said Ms Connell, team leader for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Asked for the Israeli army’s response, a spokesperson said the military has sought to evacuate civilians from areas of fighting, but Hamas systematically attempts to prevent that effort.
The army spokesperson said the Palestinian militant group uses civilians as human shields, an accusation the group denies.
Ms Connell described the death of a nine-year-old boy named Ahmed in Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, where many wounded in Israeli air strikes overnight were taken and where she spent around 1½ hours.
“He was not in an area under an evacuation order; he was in an area that was supposed to be safe. There is no safe place in Gaza,” she said, adding that new air strikes took place when she was at the hospital, and she witnessed wounded people being brought in.
She shared the text of a notification from the Israeli military urging residents of at least half a dozen central Gazan neighbourhoods to evacuate on Dec 22.
It said the Israel Defence Forces would soon be operating in their neighbourhood, and urged them to evacuate “temporarily and move to shelters” in Deir al-Balah.
The army spokesperson told Reuters: “The IDF will act against Hamas wherever it operates, with full commitment to international law, while distinguishing between terrorists and civilians, and taking all feasible precautions to minimise harm to civilians.”
US officials have repeatedly said they expect Israel to scale down its operations to a more low-intensity phase of more targeted and surgical operations.
However, Israeli operations have intensified.
Christmas Eve proved to be one of the deadliest nights in the 11-week-old war between Israel and Hamas, as Palestinian health officials in Gaza said Israeli air strikes in central and southern Gaza killed more than 100 Palestinians
As Palestinians mourned their losses, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to keep up the fight against Hamas militants, who in a cross-border attack on Oct 7, killed 1,200 people and abducted 240, according to an Israeli count. REUTERS
