Desperate Gaza City residents fled south in cars and lorries, carts and on foot on Saturday, risking death by airstrikes on the road to escape the even greater threat of an imminent Israeli ground attack on the north of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told troops massed in southern Israel that “the next stage is coming”, in a video shared by his office. The Israeli military announced on Saturday evening that it was preparing “significant ground operations”.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, who was visiting Saudi Arabia, urged restraint, calling for the protection of civilians in both the Gaza Strip and Israel.
For Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, there are limited options. They are already running out of food, water, fuel and medical supplies, and face a terrifying escalation of bloodshed and misery if the fighting intensifies.
Others fear they will be killed on the road. One civilian evacuation convoy was bombed on Friday afternoon, killing a reported 70 people, including women and children, whose bodies appear in images of the aftermath. They were on Salah-al-Din Road, a main thoroughfare Israel would declare safe less than an hour later.
Forensic Architecture, a London-based research agency, and its partner unit at the Palestinian human rights organisation al-Haq used aerial photos and social media posts to geolocate the site of the strike, sharing its findings with the Observer.
The BBC’s Verify unit came to the same conclusion. The victims were part of an unprecedented toll from airstrikes, which by Saturday evening reached more than 2,200. That included 724 children and 458 women, the Gaza health ministry said.
There is no way for people to get out or humanitarian relief to get in. Israel has sealed all crossings into its territory and Egypt reinforced its border crossing, saying it would not allow refugees to enter.
Foreign citizens were briefly offered hope they might be allowed to leave under a deal agreed by Egypt, Israel and the US. But the crossing to Egypt had not opened to anyone by Saturday night.
Israel has vowed to obliterate Hamas after its fighters broke through the hi-tech fence surrounding the strip and went on a murderous rampage, killing at least 1,300 people, mainly Israeli civilians and seizing dozens of hostages last weekend.
Before its campaign, the Israeli military warned more than 1 million civilians to leave the north, originally by a Saturday morning deadline that was later extended to the evening. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said the mass movement of so many people across an active war zone “is extremely dangerous – and in some cases, simply not possible”.
Medics are struggling to cope already, in hospitals crammed with patients and people seeking shelter from bombs and missiles. “There are people sleeping on the floors everywhere, even inside the hospital. The crowding is going to lead to an infectious disease outbreak,” said Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon at Shifa hospital in Gaza City. “The doctors have brought their families into the hospital for safety – I slept on an operating room table last night. One of our plastic surgery trainees at Shifa was killed last night with 30 members of his direct family.”
There were also mounting fears of a communications blackout as Palestinians across Gaza found themselves increasingly without power or access to phone networks.
Israel’s military has said it is preparing for a long campaign in Gaza, where Hamas has been preparing defences, including networks of tunnels, for years. About 360,000 reservists have been mobilised, the largest number in Israel’s history, while convoys of tanks have gathered near the border, and some troops made initial ground operations in Gaza on Friday.
Tank-backed forces had mounted raids to hit Palestinian rocket crews and gather information on the location of hostages, a military spokesman said. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) also claimed to have killed the head of Hamas’s air operations, Murad Abu Murad.
But Israel has not detailed its objectives in the operation, beyond the destruction of Hamas. Asked on Saturday what an Israeli military victory might look like, an IDF spokesperson, Lt Col Richard Hecht, said: “That is a big question. I don’t think I have the capability right now to answer that.”
Palestinians and some regional officials have said they fear Israel’s ultimate aim is not only to destroy Hamas, but to push Palestinian people out of Gaza. This would mirror the Nakba, the Arabic term for the forcible expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians from what was previously British mandate-controlled Palestine during the creation of Israel in 1948.
King Abdullah of Jordan, whose country borders the occupied West Bank, has warned “against any attempt to forcibly displace Palestinians from all Palestinian territories or cause their internal displacement”. The head of the 22-member Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, urgently appealed to Guterres to condemn “this insane Israeli effort to transfer the population”.
Hamas has called Israel’s evacuation order propaganda, and mosques in Gaza City blared messages urging residents to stay, Reuters reported. “Hold on to your homes. Hold on to your land,” said one broadcast, as tens of thousands headed south.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said the evacuation warning was “to temporarily move [people] south … to mitigate civilian harm”, adding that the UN should be “praising Israel for these precautionary actions”. Mahmoud Shalabi, who is coordinating an emergency medical response with the group Medical Aid for Palestinians is among those who have decided to stay in a city closing down under heavy bombardment.
“All the bakeries are now closed, but even with the ones that are closed there are plenty of people waiting outside them, as though there’s a tiny sliver of hope that they’ll reopen,” he said. “I went to try and go to the bank to get cash, and found it was partially destroyed by a bombardment that happened just in front of it. I’m lucky that I have a generator and I can pump water from my water tanks.”
Israel’s faith in its army and intelligence services has been shaken by the attack, and although there is popular support for some form of military action against Hamas, there is also a great deal of anger with the government. Idit Silman, a Likud politician and member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, was recently chased out of a hospital after healthcare workers and members of the public shouted: “You ruined this country … get out of here.” On Saturday
protesters gathered in central Tel Aviv to demonstrate against the government’s handling of the crisis and the lack of information on the dead and the dozens of missing, who are believed to be held hostage in Gaza. They chanted “Bibi to jail”, using a nickname for Netanyahu.
“I want my daughter back and I am not going to move from here … until they bring her back,” said Shira Albag, 52, whose daughter Liri Albag was in an army base attacked by Hamas. She appeared in a hostage video in her pyjamas, Shira said.With the focus on Gaza, there are also fears that the war could draw in other regional players. Hostilities have been spreading, including to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Israeli forces said early on Saturday that they had “struck a Hezbollah terror target in southern Lebanon” in response to a drone crossing the border.
In mid-afternoon, Hezbollah said it had launched “precise and direct hits”, using missiles and mortar rounds on the disputed Shebaa farms area, a slim strip of territory in the occupied Golan Heights claimed by both Lebanon and Israel that the group has frequently selected as a target.
The Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed on Friday while working in southern Lebanon, after missiles were fired from the direction of Israel, according to another Reuters videographer on the scene. Six other journalists were injured.
The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, and a Hezbollah lawmaker blamed the incident on Israel. Israel’s UN envoy said it would investigate what had happened in the area after the journalist’s death.
