by Sami Abu Salem, Wafa News (translated from Arabic version):
Since October 5, 2024, the Israeli occupation has continued its ground invasion of the northern Gaza Strip, with continuous bloody bombings and a tight siege that prevents the entry of food and medical aid. Israeli forces have been targeting hospitals and medical personnel, which forced thousands of citizens to be forcibly displaced from the town of Jabalia and its refugee camp and the towns of Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.
Citizens who were displaced from the northern Gaza Strip told Wafa about the suffering they experienced during their displacement journey, and the massacres committed by the Israeli occupation against unarmed civilians in the north.
Saeed Abu Sharkh told a Wafa news correspondent near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, that he was forced to flee the town of Beit Lahia a few days ago after the destruction and massacres committed by the Israeli occupation against the tens of thousands of civilians remaining in the city.
He added that the Israeli occupation forces set up a military checkpoint at the town of Jabalia, and are subjecting the displaced people, including women and children, to interrogation, assault and abuse, before allowing some to cross the checkpoint, while detaining young and middle-aged men who are trying to flee with their families.
Abu Sharkh pointed out the difficulty of the displacement route in light of the continued raids by Israeli occupation aircraft and drones that fire bullets and drop bombs, as hundreds of civilians have been killed over the past six weeks while attempting to follow Israeli orders and flee the area. He also pointed out the difficulty of securing food and water in light of the imposed siege.
He shared his accounts of massacres he witnessed, committed by the Israeli occupation in the north over the past six weeks: targeting entire families, preventing ambulance and rescue crews from reaching the bombing sites to retrieve the killed and wounded, and bodies that remain under the rubble to this day, with families desperate to locate those who have gone missing during this periiod.
Abu Sharkh said: “The Israeli occupation’s goal is to destroy the northern Gaza Strip, kill the Palestinian residents and displace those who remain.”
For his part, citizen Yousef Khalil (35 years old), who was living with his family of five in the vicinity of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the town of Beit Lahia, said that he and his family were forced to flee after thirty days of terror in the shadow of the continuous Israeli bombardment by planes, artillery and drones, the killing of hundreds of Palestinians, and the inability to extract the bodies of many of those killed from under the rubble, because ambulance and rescue crews have been prevented from reaching them.
He added that his uncle and cousin’s families were removed from the civil registry after they were all killed – an extended family of 30 people – and his brother was also killed. Until now, Khalil said, the remaining family members have tried and failed to find his brother’s body under the rubble of their home.
He continued that during his displacement with his wife and three children, they faced many difficulties. There were corpses and body parts in the streets and dogs were gnawing at them. When they arrived at the Israeli occupation checkpoint, he was detained with a number of other young men for several hours, and they were subjected to abuse and assault. The Israeli occupation soldiers abducted a number of the men, likely taking them to the death camp known as Sde Teiman, an Israeli-run prison camp in the Negev desert where over 10,000 Palestinian men and boys have been taken since October 7th, 2023, and tortured for days, weeks and months on end. At least 50 have been tortured to death, including Dr Iyad al-Rantisi, the head of the maternity ward at Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was taken and tortured to death in June 2024, and Gaza’s most renowned orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, who was kidnapped by Israeli forces during their siege on al-Shifa Hospital in May and raped to death.
Abu Sharkh thanked God that he was not taken to the death camp, but was finally released from interrogation and allowed to go with his family to Gaza City.
Another internally displaced refugee, Maryam Awadiya, who was displaced with her family from the town of Beit Hanoun, said that she and her family were forced to flee in light of the intensification of the Israeli occupation’s bombing of the town, noting that the family initially headed to Ghazi al-Shawa School in Beit Hanoun, but before they reached the school, the Israeli occupation’s drones dropped fliers on the street: “evacuation orders” for the entire area, demanding that all civilians head south via Salah al-Din Street.
She added that the displacement route was difficult and fraught with danger, in light of the Israeli occupation tanks deployed near them, and the continuous shelling, in addition to her suffering with her two small children and the difficulty of providing them with milk and diapers.
This is the third time that the Israeli occupation forces have invaded the northern Gaza Strip since the start of the war of extermination began more than a year ago, following invasions in December 2023 and May 2024.
The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Muhannad Hadi, described the situation in one of the displacement sites in northern Gaza as miserable, saying: “This is not a place fit for human survival. This misery must end and the war must stop. The situation is beyond imagination.”
During his visit to the region, which began on November 6, 2024, Hadi said that he heard horrific stories from the people he met in northern Gaza, stressing that no one should have to bear what the people in the Gaza Strip have been going through for the past thirteen months.
“These are the victims of this war, these are the ones who pay the price of this war – the children around me here, the women, the elderly, ” he continued.
“What I see now is completely different from what I saw in northern Gaza just two months ago in September 2024. In this school alone, there were 500 people living there, now there are more than 1,500 people. There is a shortage of food, there is sewage everywhere, and there is also waste and garbage, ” he added .
During their displacement, Palestinian families have been forced to seek refuge in schools or the homes of their relatives or acquaintances, and some have set up tents in the streets, schools, or even playgrounds and squares, under difficult humanitarian conditions where there is no sufficient water or food, and diseases are running rampant.
The ongoing Israeli genocidal war on the Strip since October 7 , 2023, has resulted in more than 145,000 killed and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that has claimed the lives of dozens of children and the elderly, in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.
The number of people displaced within the Strip since the beginning of the war has reached two million people out of a total population of 2.3 million before the war.
In contempt of the international community, Israel, the occupying power, continues its massacres in Gaza, ignoring the UN Security Council resolution to stop them immediately, and the orders of the International Court of Justice to take measures to prevent acts of genocide and to improve the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza.
