Israeli evacuation orders force displaced Gazans into ever-smaller spaces

There have been 16 evacuation orders this month, with the most recent covering parts of Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, the only major urban area that has yet to see a prolonged military incursion. The affected blocks contain critical civilian infrastructure: warehouses full of humanitarian supplies; thoroughfares for delivering aid, now including polio vaccines; and 17 health centers, according to the United Nations. As the Israel Defense Forces closed in this week, hundreds of patients fled al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the largest medical center in central Gaza.

Palestinians have been urged to flee to Mawasi, an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone along the coast that aid groups and the displaced say is already desperately overcrowded and underserved. A Washington Post analysis found that evacuation notices since May have reduced the size of the area by about a third.

On Friday, the IDF said it had completed operations in Deir al-Balah and the southern city of Khan Younis, but did not say whether its troops would withdraw. The military’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, said in a separate statement that Palestinians evacuated from some areas in both cities would be allowed to return, adding that the humanitarian zone would be “adapted.”

But as with previous orders, it was unclear how long the areas — covering several “blocks” identified by the military — would be free from combat, or how many people were capable of returning.

“The IDF so-called humanitarian zone is no longer a viable place for us to render aid,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of the U.N. humanitarian agency’s Gaza office, told The Post. “The system is dead.”

Each displacement, Gazans say, is harder and more painful than the last.

Every time, “we feel that the world has turned upside down on our heads,” said Adli Abu Taha, 35, a journalist originally from Rafah, in southern Gaza, who has been displaced five times.

There are the expected hardships along the way, Abu Taha said: “The heat, the physical exhaustion, the loss of security, the financial costs.”

Even worse, he said, is the knowledge that “there are no empty places. … There is no water, no food.”

The Israel Defense Forces says it communicates evacuation orders through phone calls, text messages, fliers and social media, referring reporters to a gridded map that is constantly updated. The military said its evacuation orders, including those within the humanitarian zone, are designed “to mitigate harm to the civilian population and keep civilians away from areas of combat.”

Palestinian families — cut off from stable electricity and communication networks — say IDF maps are difficult to access and hard to read. Families have followed directions to areas marked as safe, only for them to be evacuated soon after. In some cases, residents have been told to flee toward areas actively under fire.

The IDF puts the blame on Hamas, saying the group “systematically violates international law and operates from within civilian infrastructure, exploiting the civilian population as a human shield for their terror activities against the State of Israel.”

In December, civilians were told to evacuate Khan Younis ahead of a major military operation; Rafah became a refuge of last resort for hundreds of thousands of people. Israel also declared a humanitarian zone in Mawasi, a desolate patch of sandy lots and open beach between two southern cities, and promised that aid and shelter would be available there.

But there was no preexisting infrastructure — food, water, toilets, health care and space for tents were all hard to come by, families said. The area was never fully spared from attack or outfitted to increase the flow of assistance, and its size and shape have been “continuously in flux,” according to the U.N. humanitarian agency’s Petropoulos.

Israel originally called Mawasi a safe zone, later amending the description to “safer.” From the start, Petropoulos said, it “was never anything like a humanitarian zone.”

Soon enough, though, families in Rafah were streaming there too, as the IDF in May said it was ordering more than a million people out of the border city to take on Hamas’s remaining southern battalions. Under international pressure, Israel also expanded the humanitarian zone to include parts of Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.

Yet round after round of evacuation notices in the following months have steadily whittled away at the zone. There were five new orders between Aug. 19 and 24 — the most in any single week during the war, according to the United Nations.

As of May 6, the zone extended for nearly 24 square miles, according to a Post analysis. By Aug. 16, evacuation orders had reduced it to roughly 16 square miles, and carve-outs had cut the area nearly in half.

Abu Taha’s story is emblematic of what Palestinians say is an exodus without end. On May 9, an Israeli strike destroyed his house in eastern Rafah. His wife, 7-month-old son and elderly mother fled to his sister’s home just west of the city.

They didn’t stay long. Israeli forces continued to advance, and on May 29 the family fled to Khan Younis — by then part of the expanded humanitarian zone — where they crowded into a half-destroyed home with another of Abu Taha’s sisters and 20 other relatives. Despite the dangers, he continued to move between areas for work.

In early July, the IDF ordered people in parts of Khan Younis to evacuate again, saying it was targeting Hamas fighters who had regrouped there. Tens of thousands fled to central Gaza. Abu Taha prepared to leave for Mawasi, but his young family ultimately decided to wait it out, believing they were still within the safer area. It was a move they would soon regret.

Abu Taha was out of the house on July 22 when his wife called in a panic as shells fell around her. The Israel military had just issued a new directive for their neighborhood in Khan Younis: Hamas had launched rockets “from the eastern part of the humanitarian zone,” the IDF said, and “remaining in that zone has become dangerous.”

Abu Taha raced back to the house, he recalled, pushing through confused crowds in the streets to reach his family. When they first fled Rafah, Abu Taha said, he was able to hire a moving truck. This time, he said, it cost $135 for a taxi to help carry some of their luggage for a short distance. In his haste to leave, he left behind most of his clothes and his computer. His mother leaned against him for support and his wife carried their infant son as they made the trek to Mawasi.

Eventually, the family found a place for a tent in the western part of the zone.

Life there, he said, “cannot be described in words.” Food and clean water are scarce; bathrooms are few and filthy; “there is no privacy at all.” He fears it’s only a matter of time until they are uprooted again.

There are now about 30,000 to 34,000 people per square kilometer in Mawasi, the United Nations said this week, which has “exacerbated the dire shortage of essential resources.” As more people flee central Gaza in the coming days and weeks, those numbers will only increase.

Walaa Abu Jamea and some 30 of her family members have moved several times within the zone as the displaced compete for ever-smaller spaces. Her despair grows with each dislocation.

“Do people in the world know what it means to search for stability and not find it for all this time?”

Granados reported from Montilla, Spain, Harb from London and Brown from Washington. Laris Karklis contributed to this report.