Thousands of people are heading to southern Gaza, following orders from the Israeli army, which forces them to leave their homes to, in theory, be more protected when the ground invasion begins.
This exodus is being slow and painful.
This morning, Hamas continued firing rockets against southern and central Israel, while Jewish State forces continued bombing the strip.
A military spokesman assures that civilians living in Gaza are not enemies and are not targets of airstrikes. Those who use the main road that goes south through the interior will be safe until four in the afternoon, and the same will be true for those who opt for an avenue closer to the coast.
Both routes are heavily damaged by bombing. The ruins and sinkholes make walking very slow.
The caravans have to cross the wadi Gaza, the dry river and the valley that divides the strip from east to west.
There are families that travel in carts pulled by donkeys and others do so on foot, carrying what they can.
The little gasoline that remains is in the vehicles of the wealthiest, who have also had underground garages to store them. The most vulnerable, as always, have been left behind, and they are the vast majority.
Israel has ordered the evacuation of 1.1 million people, a forced displacement of the population that worsens the humanitarian crisis and which, according to the Geneva Conventions, amounts to a war crime.
The American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, insisted on Friday in Doha that Israel must comply with “the rules of war”, that is, protect the civilian population.
The Israeli armed forces consider that the warning that was sent to Gazans’ cell phones and the leaflets that were dropped from the sky are a help rather than a threat.
“Civilians of Gaza City,” the army note said, “evacuate to the south for your safety and the safety of your families and to distance yourself from the Hamas terrorists, who use you as human shields.”
However, only a few thousand people heed the order. The majority have chosen to stay at home. Some because they prefer to defy death rather than continue carrying the stigma of being a refugee, and others because they are simply too old, they don’t have the way to get around, they sympathize or are afraid of snubbing Hamas.
The Islamists have asked Gazans not to heed the evacuation notice, not to be victims of Israel’s “psychological warfare,” although it is evident that it needs them to stop the announced land invasion.
They are human shields and always have been. Hamas would not have survived without them. There are many houses and rooftops that are used to launch the rockets that, even today, a week after the war started, continue to fall on Israel.
Blinken assures that the US is working to establish safe zones and open humanitarian corridors. “It is possible,” US diplomatic sources have said, that the Rafah crossing will be open this Saturday afternoon.
Israeli aircraft have attacked it twice and it is badly damaged, but if the trucks with aid can get through, the United States will insist that Israel not oppose it.
Israel has said it will not restore water and electricity supplies, as well as food and medicine, until Hamas releases the approximately 150 hostages it captured last Saturday.
The US, however, is its main ally and has reiterated its commitment to supporting it until it manages to defeat Hamas.
Seeing the suffering of so many Gazans, as Arabs throughout the Middle East do through networks that broadcast the war live, is a shock that encourages radicalism and can extend the conflict, just what the US is trying to do. avoid.
Humanitarian aid has begun to arrive at the Egyptian airport of El Arish, near Gaza, which can alleviate the shortages suffered by displaced people if the parties in combat agree on how to distribute it.
The UN, in any case, insists that Israel reconsider the evacuation order because it is having “devastating humanitarian consequences.”
The UN estimates that the bombings have destroyed 1,300 buildings. This means that more than 5,000 homes are completely destroyed and almost 4,000 are uninhabitable.
This means that some 400,000 people have been left homeless and in the south there is nothing to accommodate those arriving from Gaza City, Jabalia and Beach Camp, among other towns.
The exoduses in the Middle East have biblical meaning. Jews, Christians and Muslims have suffered throughout history, and after the dead, there is no more powerful image in the region than that of families expelled from their homes, carrying everything they can, heading towards an uncertain and precarious.
If the Middle East continues to be the most turbulent region in the world today, it is largely due to the forced displacement, between 1947 and 1949, of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel. A significant part of these people settled in Gaza, in refugee camps such as Jabalia and Beach Camp.
80% of Gaza’s population descends from those first refugees. Therefore, the order to evacuate had the weight of a curse rather than a help.
The WHO states that the mobilization amounts to “a death sentence” for the injured. There are more than 7,300, according to the latest count and the dead exceed 1,800.
Health personnel, who can barely care for the injured due to the lack of almost everything necessary to save lives, have announced that, no matter what happens, they will stay with them in the hospitals.
The Israeli army is awaiting the order to begin the ground offensive. He claims he is ready. In fact, on Friday several commandos entered the strip to recover bodies of Israelis who fell a week ago.
A military spokesperson affirms that these incursions “have been limited” and have also served “to cleanse the area of ??terrorists and weapons.”
This area is, basically, the 500-meter-wide no man’s land that runs from the urban fabric to the fence that closes the enclave and that the Hamas commandos crossed on Saturday to attack the surrounding Israeli towns.
About 1,300 Israelis died a week ago at the hands of Hamas guerrillas. It was the worst tragedy in the country’s history and President Herzog believes it is the greatest since the Holocaust.
Israel remains in shock. Patriotism has overflowed and support for the military strategy has no cracks. Furthermore, the solidarity mobilization of the population is exemplary. Volunteers in dozens of organizations and restaurants prepare rations for soldiers and take them to the bases.
The Ministry of Defense has mobilized 360,000 reservists in less than a week and cannot feed them all. A few days ago, the Ha’achin pizzeria in Tel Aviv prepared 2,000 portions, packaged them and took them to a base. When they arrived, the guard stopped them, took a ration and took it to the rabbi of the detachment. This man, clearly emerging from the Old Testament, refused food because he was not kosher.
The story was explained to me by another rabbi, sad because the most intransigent build walls of unreason. “The logical thing,” he told me, “would have been to allow each soldier to decide whether or not he wanted the pizza, but the rabbi imposed his criteria on some young people called to defend their country by a State that not only cannot feed them, but has broken the social contract by which he had agreed to protect them.”
In Gaza there is no social contract, only a radical regime, which uses religion and terror to attack Israel and subjugate the population.
The consequences speak for themselves.
