The Israeli army ordered two Gaza City neighborhoods evacuated on Tuesday amid signs of hunger and growing desperation in the enclave’s north, as the focus of the Israeli offensive has shifted south.
The evacuations came as the World Food Program halted deliveries in the north on Tuesday, describing scenes of chaos as its teams faced looting, hungry crowds and gunfire in recent days.
The heaviest fighting and shelling in recent weeks has shifted south to the areas around Khan Younis and Rafah. However, the Israeli military’s evacuation order on Tuesday for the Zaitoun and Turkoman neighborhoods of Gaza City raised the possibility of further military moves in the north.
Northern Gaza has been decimated by four months of shelling, and ongoing fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants has severely hampered aid to the roughly 300,000 people still in the area, who the United Nations has warned are facing starvation.
WFP had suspended deliveries for the past three weeks due to security concerns, and on Sunday the agency tried to restart them, but “crowds of hungry people” surrounded the initial convoy as it headed for Gaza City, and aid workers were forced to to fend off people trying to board the trucks, the organization said in a statement.
Another motorcade on Monday “faced complete chaos and violence due to the breakdown of political order,” the statement added, saying several trucks were looted and a driver was beaten.
The WFP said it did not take the decision to suspend deliveries to northern Gaza lightly, adding that it meant “more people are at risk of starvation”.
“WFP is deeply committed to urgently reaching desperate people across Gaza, but safety and security for the delivery of critical food assistance — and for the people receiving it — must be ensured,” the statement said.
She cited the “unprecedented levels of desperation” her groups saw as evidence of Gaza’s “precipitous slide into starvation” and pointed to a UN report published on Monday that said acute malnutrition had increased in the northern part of the enclave.
Northern Gaza was the initial target of Israel’s military offensive. As Israeli forces pushed deeper into Gaza, the military urged civilians to move south for their own safety.
Hundreds of thousands have heeded the calls, and more than half of Gaza’s population is now crowded into Rafah, living in makeshift shelters and tents. However, widespread food and water shortages, combined with concerns that nowhere in Gaza was truly safe, prompted some of the displaced to return to the north.
The new evacuation notice issued by the Israeli military on Tuesday called on people in the two neighborhoods of Gaza City to move to an area around the coastal village of Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in the southern part of the enclave. The alert was posted in Arabic on social media, but communications networks have been severely disrupted in Gaza, so it was unclear how many people saw it.
Amera Harouda and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed to the report.
