Gazans find little help in the village where they were advised to move

Faced with heavy fighting in southern Gaza, large numbers of civilians have fled to a small village on the coast where Israel has said it can find safety. Its name is Al-Mawasi – and once there, Gazans have found no shelter, no humanitarian aid and little even basic infrastructure.

Yousef Hammash, an employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council, was among those who went to the village. He and his family had been in Khan Younis, where heavy urban fighting has raged in recent days. When they arrived, he said, they found little more than a barren open-air area where people struggled to build makeshift shelters.

“Hundreds of thousands of people from Khan Younis have fled to Al-Mawasi and Rafah,” Mr Hammash said, referring to the nearby town on the border with Egypt. “It went from being an empty land to a very, very busy area.”

The exact number of people moved in recent days could not be confirmed, but on Sunday Israel called for the evacuation of about 20 percent of the land area of ​​Khan Younis, where more than 620,000 people live, according to sources. the United Nations.

Early this week, the UN said that almost 85 percent of Gaza’s population, about 1.9 million people, had fled their homes during the war, which started on October 7. Many of them left the north before the Israeli ground invasion. over there.

Mr Hammash said people in Al-Mawasi built shelters from materials such as wood and plastic that provided few barriers against the elements.

“It doesn’t provide any protection, but it does give them a sense of security,” said Mr. Hammash, who was building his own shelter. “The challenge is to cover your head against the harsh weather that is coming, because winter is just around the corner.”

Another Gazan, Mohamed Hamdan, said he thought conditions were especially difficult for women and children, many of whom fell ill.

“There are so many hardships here,” Mr Hamdan said. “There is no water, no food, nothing to drink. Everything is difficult here.”

Al-Mawasi is about half a mile wide and ten miles long and was once a Bedouin enclave in one of the Israeli settlements that Israel dismantled in the Gaza Strip in 2005.

Israel began urging Gazans to seek safety there early in the war, releasing videos in both cases Arabic And Englishlike Cards in mid-October labeled with the name of the village in both languages.

“To the people of the Gaza Strip and Gaza City, I beg you all and tell you all: leave your homes,” said a video in Arabic, as a map of Al-Mawasi flashed on the screen. “If necessary, international humanitarian aid will be sent there.”

Masa’ad Abu Jalhum, a resident of Gaza City who was interviewed by Sky News in Al-Mawasi on Wednesday described a chaotic and crowded scene, with people traveling on foot, by car and by horse and cart with whatever belongings they could carry.

“We got here and everyone was here,” said Ms. Abu Jalhum, who was interviewed with a child on her lap. “Where did all these people come from? It was like the Day of Judgment, when everyone rose from the dead.”

Unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ in Gaza, such as Al-Mawasi, have been opposed by the United Nations, which says that unless all parties agree to their creation, they have the potential to cause ‘unacceptable harm to civilians, including large-scale loss of human lives’.

In Washington, a senior administration official said the Biden administration believed Israel was not forcing people to move to Al-Mawasi, and that it had been named as an area where the Israeli military would not operate. The official said there were several potential evacuation locations in addition to Al-Mawasi.

But now that large parts of the Gaza Strip have been under evacuation orders from the Israeli army, there are few places for Gazans to go. And many places they were supposed to go were bombed themselves.

Ameera Harouda reporting contributed.