Fleeing Northern Gaza Once Again, Palestinians Fear They Will Never Return

Residents of northern Gaza began fleeing en masse on the morning of Saturday, May 17, as the Israeli military launched a wave of indiscriminate shelling and airstrikes on Beit Lahia and its surrounding areas. The bombardment marked the onset of Israel’s expanded ground invasion to “conquer” the Gaza Strip.

That same night, as residents sensed the imminent threat posed by the indiscriminate shelling and anticipated an Israeli ground incursion into their neighborhoods, many prepared to flee at first light. Residents told Mondoweiss that their urgency was driven by previous experience, as residents of northern Gaza have repeatedly endured Israeli military incursions marked by mass arrests and summary executions.

In a statement on Saturday, the Gaza Government Media Office said that “the Israeli occupation has displaced more than 300,000 Palestinians from northern Gaza” within the space of 48 hours.

Residents fled from the north to Gaza City, the Government Media Office said, adding that the city “lacks any infrastructure to accommodate this massive number of forcibly displaced people.”

This latest wave of forced displacement has raised fears that the Israeli military plans to make good on the promises of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to force the people of Gaza even further south into Rafah, now a flattened wasteland unfit for human habitation. It is part of Netanyahu and Smotrich’s publicly articulated plan to take over the distribution of aid in Gaza, which would be concentrated in specific locations in the south and facilitate the eventual expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza via “voluntary migration.”

Residents fear that once operations in the north are complete, the full evacuation of Gaza City may follow. These concerns have been further amplified by reports suggesting that countries such as Libya and Syria may be preparing to receive Palestinian refugees.

Residents now fear a replay of the war’s early stages — renewed assaults on the north, mass displacement to the south, and preventing residents from returning.

Hunger on the Road

On the displacement routes where hundreds of refugees congregate, Fawzia Hamad, 51, walks without knowing her destination. The exhaustion is evident on her face. “We left our homes due to the intensity of the shelling,” says the mother of five. “We escaped death by a miracle. Everywhere we looked, shells were falling, and we could hear people screaming.”

Hamad fled Beit Lahia in northern Gaza with her children last Saturday without knowing where she would go next. “We fled to our relatives’ house for one night, but they told us to look for another place. And here I am, looking for a place, but I have nothing: no tent, no food, no water,” she explains. “I sent my children to look for somewhere for us to stay.”

Hamad tells Mondoweiss that she has not eaten in two days, as the Gaza Strip continues to experience worsening conditions of famine following Israel’s prevention of the entry of aid into the Strip over the past two months. At the start of the week, Netanyahu announced that Israel would allow “minimal” amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza for “diplomatic reasons” — to avoid war crimes charges and images of famine.

“Since yesterday, my children and I have only eaten one lentil meal for the entire day,” Hamad says. “We don’t have enough food to walk. We have nothing but the homes the Israeli army kicked us out of.”

Hamad says she cannot afford the price of a vehicle ride to transport her along with her children to Gaza City, and she cannot walk the entire way. “We’re tired and weak, and we’re so hungry,” Hamad explains. “We have been exhausted by a year and a half of displacement and daily death. Are there no sane people in this world who will stop our deaths?”

“We want this war to stop. We want to return to our homes safely, without fear of mass death,” she adds.

Bracing for the Final Displacement

Before the ongoing displacement campaign in the northern Gaza Strip began, the Israeli army operated for months in the city of Rafah, about a fifth of Gaza’s territory. The southernmost governorate was completely flattened, as the Israeli army demolished most of the built structures in the area through extensive detonation and bulldozing operations.

This was followed by news of a dystopian new Israel plan for taking over the distribution of aid in Gaza as a means of coercing Gazans to flee their homes and concentrate in Rafah, where the aid distribution would be based, and run by an American contracting firm. North Gaza residents fear that once they arrive to receive the aid, they will be prevented from returning to their homes. These same fears have prompted international aid organizations to call this plan a “blueprint for ethnic cleansing.”

Moreover, the displacement has not been confined to northern Gaza, instead marking the beginning of a broader wave across the Strip. On Monday, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to residents in eastern Khan Younis. By Tuesday, similar warnings were sent to neighborhoods east of Gaza City — the second such order in two months, according to residents of those areas.

Muhammad Zein al-Din, 46, fled his home in Khan Younis after receiving an evacuation order from the Israeli military. Like many others, he headed toward the Mawasi area, which had been designated as a “safe zone.”

“We are fleeing from one death to another,” he says. “As soon as we reached Mawasi, the Israeli army bombed the area. They are lying, telling us to go to so-called safe areas while continuing to target us. They want us out of Gaza completely. They want us off our land so it can be occupied.”

Zein al-Din guesses that this will be the last time they are displaced, because the next step will be wholesale expulsion.

“They have all agreed on our fate: Israel, America, and the Arabs,” he says. “They want to give it to America and Israel. They want the Gaza Strip without its people. But they will find our blood under the sand and our skin on the walls of our bombed houses.”

Zein al-Din explains that his reality and that of countless others in Gaza have been dictated by messages from the Israeli army, delivered via mobile texts or leaflets dropped from the sky, telling them where to go next.

“Every Palestinian in Gaza has become a mobile person, forced to move based on these orders: ‘Leave your home and head to the Mawasi area,’” he explains. “We have no choice but to comply if we want to survive.”

“After that, they will direct us to specific points where we will be deported to countries that have agreed to take us,” he adds. “But we will not leave our land. If the army forces us out of Gaza, it will lead to the most devastating bloodshed. We will die on our land before we abandon it.”