As the Israeli army has expanded its attack on the Gaza Strip, taking control of more territory in parts of the South and North and issuing new evacuation orders, many people who have just returned to their homes have been displaced once again.
Israel’s route to the southern city of Rafar pushed thousands of families from the Tal Al-Sultan neighborhood, near the border with Egypt, to leave on Sunday before Israeli troops are completely surrounding the area in the afternoon.
For many, the new round of mass shift has brought back painful memories from the previous days of the Gaza war. Residents of Tal Al-Sultan and nearby areas said they had to walk on a particular route amid bombing, bringing very few objects during the sacred month of Ramadan, when Muslims quickly during the day.
Most of those who left on Sunday walked several miles north to the town of Khan Younis, where they were left without refuge due to a serious lack of basic needs and scenes, the local government of Rafah, which includes Tal Al-Sultan.
The Israeli military renewed its attack on Gaza last week after a deadlock in talks to expand a fragile, temporary ceasefire with Hamas in force in mid -January. This truce was intended to be the first of the three phases that led to the end of a war that began with the attack under Hamas’ guidance on Israel on October 7, 2023, but the second phase was delayed indefinitely.
The Gaza Ministry of Health said on Monday that 61 people were killed in Israeli bombings the previous day, the day after stating that the number of deaths in the enclave had exceeded 50,000 since the war began almost 18 months ago. Ministry data do not distinguish citizens and fighters.
The Israeli army said in a statement Sunday that his troops had killed several fighters in Tal Al-Sultan and invaded a site that said it was used as a Hamas command and control center. She did not provide evidence of her allegations, which could not be verified independently.
On Monday, Al Jazeera said Hussam Shabat, a journalist who contributed to his coverage in the war, was killed on an Israeli air route on his car in northern Gaza. At least 208 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, according to the Gaza Government Press Office. The Israeli army said it was considering the report.
The videos available online and verified by the New York Times show the seemingly lifeless bodies of Mr Shabat and two other men, as well as a donkey who had pulled a basket, on a dusty street in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. Next to them is a car mounted with what seems to be a bullet or holes, with an Al Jazeera emblem and the “television” letters in the windscreen. A man shouts Mr. Shabat’s name and shakes his body, trying to get an answer, while others carry a person whose situation is unclear.
The Palestinian urban defense in Gaza said on Sunday that the siege of Israel for Tal Al-Sultan had threatened the lives of about 50,000 people living there, with some incompetent or reluctant to leave. Some residents, after months of repetitive displacement, had just recently returned to their homes or whatever was left of them during the short -lived cease.
“We left our backs on our backs under fire and bombing,” said Mustafa Jabr, 36, after walking for about six hours along a sandy journey with his family from their home at Tal Al-Sultan on Sunday morning. “It was a very stunning and intense attack,” he said from a friend’s home in southern Khan Younis, where the family was now shelters.
Mr Jabr said that before the neighborhood surrounded, the Israeli vehicles had regularly exhausted the area around the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow strip of Gaza along the border with Egypt and one of the main points stuck in the conversations. But at dawn on Sunday, residents were injured by the “sudden bombing”, before leaflets ordering people to evacuate along a particular route began to sink down, he said.
“So we headed north under a hail from a bombing tank and a quadcopter fire that injured dozens,” Mr Jabr said. “Many older people were abandoned along the way because they were too weak to continue walking in the sand,” he said, adding, “the scenes I saw on the street were horrifying, there were so many children and the elderly and people with disabilities.”
Mr Jabr’s family was now among a growing number of families in Gaza, who are once again wondering when they could return to their homes.
Ahmad and Faten al-Sayyed also fled on Sunday, walking with their four children on the stage of a relative in western Han Yays. They recently returned to their damaged home in Rafah after nine months of refuge in a scene on Khan Younis, just to find back in another scene less than a month later.
“I thought the second phase of the negotiations would start while we were back at our home in Rafah,” Mr Al-Sayyed said.
Although heard occasionally shootings in Rafah in recent days, Mr Al-Sayyed said he was shocked when the Israeli troops proceeded to the area. “We never imagined it would escalate in a complete siege and military operation,” he said. “
Once the evacuation orders were issued, Mr Al-Sayyed told his children to pack two clothes each in their school bags.
Some on the way brought terrified, shouting children, while others engage in what they existed. Most of the adults, observing Ramadan, neither ate nor drank anything along the way.
The elderly and the sick, some in wheelchairs, struggled to keep up as drones “followed us, hovering above, moving right and left, seeing every step,” Mr Al-Sayyed said.
The crowd was trapped for almost an hour and a half, as the Israeli forces are blocking the road, while people begged the Red Cross to take them to security.
“We could hear bulldozers and occasional shot,” Mr Al-Sayyed recalled. “Later, I saw how they had cleared trails for people to cross, build the embankment of sand around the area, create fences and cameras and place soldiers over these sand barriers,” he added, referring to Israeli troops.
They were then ordered to continue walking towards a United Nations warehouse, where an Israeli tank stopped again and the troops told everyone to sit on the ground.
“After nearly 20 minutes, the soldiers asked women and children to sit on the right side of the road, while the men were ordered to sit on the left side,” Mr Al-Sayyed said. “People were terrified and their eyes were full of fear,” he said, adding: “Mothers were shouting for their cultivated sons, who do not want to be separated from them, fearing that they would be killed or arrested.”
In the end, it was Mr Al-Sayyed’s turn to be sought by the soldiers. He said that he was ordered to strip and made to stay sitting, with his eyes, for more than an hour. Then he was released and fell with his wife and children.
“All I could hear was crying and all I could see were scared faces,” said Ms Al-Sayyed.
“My son Mohammed was very terrified when he saw a dead boy,” he added. “He just collapsed in the sand, screaming in a completely unexpected way, and all I could do was cry with him.”
Iyad abuheweila References are contributed by Constantinople.
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish