Fearful, humiliated and desperate: Gaza residents head south facing horrors

They walked for hours and raised their hands when they encountered Israeli troops with guns pointed at them to show their identification cards – or wave white rags. All around them were the sounds of gunfire and the incessant buzzing of drones. Bodies were strewn with rubble in the streets.

For the tens of thousands of Gazans who have fled the northern part of the enclave where the heaviest fighting has occurred, the evacuation south has been a perilous journey, according to at least ten Gazans with whom The New York Times spoke at the event. on site and by telephone. Even though a tenuous ceasefire since Friday has brought temporary relief from the bombardment, they face an uncertain future – and the threat that attacks will return, leaving them displaced again.

The Israeli army launched a deadly bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip after an attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials. In the seven weeks since, Israel has bombarded the small coastal enclave with the aim of destroying Hamas’s military capabilities. According to Gaza health authorities, more than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed so far on November 21.

Israel has for weeks been urging Gazans living in northern cities to flee along Salah al-Din Street, the main north-south highway in the strip.

Those who were lucky or had sufficient resources fled early, but some Gazans who spoke to the Times said they could not leave earlier because they have no family or anyone they know in the south, cannot leave older relatives behind or do not have the resources. . Instead, many sheltered in increasingly dangerous and desperate conditions in schools and hospitals across the north. But at some point they made the difficult decision to leave.

Even that decision was fraught. In the weeks leading up to the ceasefire, Israel also bombed the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and some Gazans believe it is not worth uprooting themselves further without a guarantee of shelter in the south.

The United Nations say 1.7 million of the Hamas-controlled enclave’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced.

Gazans who spoke to the Times said they felt shame, loss of dignity and anger at having to fight for their lives in the latest war between Israel and Hamas. The journey – which takes Gazans hours depending on where in the north they leave – is usually done on foot or on a donkey cart.

Aya Habboub, 23, stayed in northern Gaza earlier this month, heavily pregnant with her third child. She gave birth in a hospital under heavy bombardment, but was forced to evacuate when the baby, whom she named Tia, was just four days old.

Barely able to walk, Mrs. Habboub tried to rest on the side of the road, but her husband urged her to continue. Israeli soldiers, she said, stopped her mother-in-law and ordered the woman to stand for half an hour and raise her hand.

“Then they were shooting,” Ms. Habboub said, “and we started running.” Ms Habboub spoke at a hospital in Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza, where many are sheltering. On her lap, cocooned in a white cloth, Tia was sleeping peacefully.

“I dropped my baby,” she said. “I cried and screamed.”

Several Gazans the Times spoke to described similar scenes of soldiers firing into the general area of ​​those fleeing. Such claims could not be independently verified.

The Israeli military has not commented on the specific allegations. In a statement responding to questions about them, the military said it had taken “significant precautions to limit harm to the civilian population.” It added that it had given advance warning of airstrikes when it could do so, and told civilians when to use “safe corridors” to evacuate.

It reiterated its claim that Hamas has embedded itself in “civilian infrastructure” and is using civilians as human shields. “The IDF is committed to ending these attacks, and as such we will attack Hamas where necessary,” the report said.

In the few days since a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, some Gazans have continued to move south. Others have tried to return north to check on their loved ones and their homes, but Israeli forces have prevented that.

Mohammed El-Sabti said he recently started a trek from Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood with 15 family members, including his elderly mother. He saw another older woman screaming on the side of the road. She begged him for help, but Mr. El-Sabti struggled with the burden he was already carrying as he pushed his mother onto a cart.

Mr El-Sabti, who is now sheltering in a university building in the southern town of Khan Younis, rejected Israeli claims about the security of the so-called humanitarian corridor that Gazans must use to flee the north.

“The corridor is not humanitarian and unsafe,” he said. “It’s an area of ​​horror.”

After weeks of intense air raids, smelling corpses and losing their homes and relatives, they speak with numbness about the horrors they saw in their hometown and on the road south.

“I had two boys and five girls,” said Malak El-Najjar, 52, who used to live in the Mukhabarat area of ​​Gaza City and now shelters in Khan Younis. “Two of the girls are dead,” killed in an airstrike before they left, she said, aged 18 and 20.

Iman Abu Halima, 33, who first fled Beit Lahiya in the north before taking temporary shelter in Jabaliya and then moving south after it became too dangerous, described seeing “bloated bodies, flies on them,” alongside scattered body parts .

“We saw a lot of dead bodies,” said Mazen Abu Habil, a 52-year-old father of eight, who eventually reached Khan Younis, which has become a refuge for displaced people. There, Gazans cram into hospitals and UN shelters, living in substandard conditions – struggling for one meal a day, sleeping with barely any blankets, and wearing the clothes they fled with.

Mr. Abu Habil used to live in Jabaliya, a neighborhood north of Gaza City that Israel says is a Hamas stronghold and has suffered airstrikes. He fled to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after his home was destroyed, and then, when it was no longer safe there, to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Israel has recently produced videos and photos showing that Al-Shifa, a sprawling complex, hides an underground military base used by Hamas. The militant group has denied operating under the hospital.

“I saw a little girl being killed on the ground,” Mr Abu Habil said. Facing Israeli soldiers patrolling nearby, he tried to cover the girl with a small cloth, he said. “When I did that, they suddenly started shooting,” he said.

He described how the Israeli soldiers, many of whom spoke Arabic, ordered him to undress and held him captive for about 90 minutes. Finally they let him go.

But that didn’t apply to everyone. Zahwa Al-Sammouni, 58, said she fled south with her family when Israeli soldiers arrested her three sons, all young men.

“What can we do?” Ms Al-Sammouni said. ‘We are too scared to scream or cry. We just want to know where our children went?

She added: “We are farmers, we have nothing to do with weapons, with Hamas or with Fatah.” She added: “We are just looking for a piece of food because we have to feed children.”

She was in hospital in Deir El-Balah with more than a dozen members of her extended family.

Ms Al-Sammouni and those with her spoke in a stream of consciousness, recalling harrowing details of their journey. They talked about Israeli troops shouting profanities at them; about how the chaos of Gaza had become a matter of survival of the fittest, with people’s humanity extending only to immediate families; about desperately searching for even salt water to drink.

Some Gazans’ journeys had several false starts. Hamada Abu Shaaban, 33, a currency trader, fled on foot after Israeli attacks took place near his home in Gaza City. He started his journey with his mother and aunt and a suitcase full of cash before clashes broke out. Mr Abu Shaaban and his family hid in a nearby garage for 16 hours until the violence subsided. They managed to get home and tried again the next day. It was not easy.

“I don’t understand how I went through all these scenes without going crazy,” he said in Al Maghazi, a community built from a refugee camp established decades ago in central Gaza.

Imad Ziyadeh, who fled south from near Beit Lahia to Khan Younis, described his journey as one of “suffering, torture and terrifying fear.”

He said people could take the barest minimum of belongings: clothes, ID cards and the rags they used as white flags.

Israeli soldiers, he said, were constantly shouting at them. And there were gruesome scenes along the way. “Bodies all around us,” he said. “If you look to the right, you see body parts.”

The comparison with the Nakba, or the displacement of Palestinians during the wars surrounding Israel’s founding, was not far from people’s minds, he said. “In 1948, we were displaced, and now, in 2023, we are being subjected to forced displacement,” Mr. Ziyadeh said. “I don’t expect to go back to North Gaza, but if they force us to go back, where will we go back to?”

Abu Bakr Bashir provided reporting from London, and Samar Hazboun from Bethlehem, West Bank.