Israel Orders More Gaza Evacuations After School Shelter Attack
The Israeli military has called for New evacuation measures in the south of the Gaza Strip after an air strike on a school that was being used as a shelter in the north of the Strip killed more than 100 Palestinians, local officials say.
On Sunday morning, women, children and men were observed running with their belongings in their hands and arms from their homes and makeshift shelters in Khan Younis. Israel has remained at the forefront of demanding mass blanket evacuations as its forces move to reoccupy areas that suffered extensive destruction where it fought Palestinian militants. The Gazan population has been living in documented displacement for the past 10 months, the majority of its 2. 3 million residents, especially many of who have been displaced on a series of occasions.
Many of these people have become refugees who live in severely overcrowded tented sites with virtually no public amenities or schools, such as the Gaza City one, attacked on Saturday. In the light of these rehearsals, almost the entire Palestinian population in the occupied territories shares the feeling that none of the places is safe under the siege, which is perceived as a deliberate calculation by the latter.
New evacuation orders include areas in Khan Younis: some of the terrain across the buffer zone, which the Israeli military has described as a humanitarian zone used to launch rockets. Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, widely employ the civilian population as disposable shields, and this is something that Israel claims to be against.
Khan Younis is the second largest city in the Gaza Strip and has been heavily damaged by both air raids from Israel and ground attacks. Many people were compelled to evacuate last week by a previous leave order: tens of thousands.
The Gaza Ministry of Health stated that the war had taken an estimated 39,699 Palestinian lives, including more than 9,261 individuals killed in Gaza as of 20 August 2014, and more than 92,212 people have been injured. Non-governmental organisations are now virtually unable to cope with the extent of the disaster and famine, so many international specialists speak of the threat of famine in the territory.
The latest evacuation orders include central, eastern and western areas of Khan Younis, which make this among the largest evacuations during the conflict that has been going on for about 10 months. As Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, has said, the people of Gaza have nowhere to go.
The situation has reached the state that 95% of all the necessary products in Gaza, which is home to 2 million people, come from Israel. Three million population were forced to flee their homes, which destroyed virtually most of the enclave’s structures. The phenomenon of ‘safe zones’, like al-Mawasi west of Khan Younis, which has been bombed more than once, illustrates the severity and dangerous character of the conditions for refugees.
