It Isn't A Good Time To Be A Gazan (Gaza War Part V)

It was the fifth day in a row that the IDF opened an evacuation window, and numbers of people fleeing south have increased each day. The UN said 2,000 had fled south on Sunday, rising to 15,000 on Tuesday. The Israeli government said 50,000 Gazans travelled via the evacuation corridor Wednesday. That number could not be independently verified, but a CNN journalist at the scene said the numbers leaving were larger than on Tuesday.

Israel has been ramping up its offensive inside Gaza, following the October 7 attacks that left 1,400 people in Israel dead.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed Tuesday that IDF troops were at the “heart of Gaza City” and targeting Hamas infrastructure and commanders there. . . . .

The IDF has been bombarding Gaza for weeks, saying it hit 14,000 terrorist targets in the densely packed territory. . . . 

“This war left nothing safe – not churches, not mosques or anything. Today, they dropped the leaflet ordering us to leave to the alleged safe area. Now we are beyond this area of Wadi Gaza, and we are still hearing bombardments. There is no safe place in Gaza.”

“We are seven families. All of our houses are gone. Nothing is left. We couldn’t take anything – no clothes, no water, nothing. The way here was very difficult. If something falls, you are not allowed to pick it up. You are not allowed to slow down. Dead bodies everywhere.”

Baraa, a 16-year-old girl, said that she had been walking for a long time.

“It felt like the Nakba [catastrophe] of 2023,” she said, using the Arabic term for the expulsion of Palestinians from their towns during the founding of Israel.

“We walked by people who were ripped to parts, dead bodies. We walked beside tanks. The Israelis called us, and they were asking people to take off their clothes and throw their belongings. Children were very tired because there was no water.”

CNN has asked the IDF about the allegation that evacuees were made to remove clothing and get rid of belongings.

“We came under heavy shelling and had no choice but to leave our area,” Hani Bakhit said. “We ended up using donkey carts because there were no cars, fuel, or drinking water available. Nothing is left for us. They forced us to leave by cutting off all available resources,” he said, referring to Israeli forces.

“People who have nothing to do with the resistance are being bombed and so they are fleeing to the south,” Khader Hamad said. “They are all children, newborns, women.”

From CNN. 

Another report states that based upon satellite images, it appears that about a third of the buildings in Gaza City have been partially or completely destroyed. Israel's top focus, at this point, is destroying the Hamas tunnel network under the city, it claims to have destroyed about 130 tunnels so far, and wiping out Hamas entirely.

This Gaza City epicenter of military action isn't huge. The evacuation zone is probably less than twelve miles from north to south, and maybe six miles from west to east, and only half or a third of that area is the built up part of Gaza City itself. The core of the conflict is an area no larger than a survey township (which is six by six miles) and maybe two-thirds of that area.

Many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, probably a majority of the people of the Gaza Strip, have fled south of the evacuation line imposed by the Israeli Defense Forces into territory without any place for most of them to stay.

So far, at least seven times as many Palestinians (about 10,500) have been killed by Israeli forces (and friendly fire from Hamas and from lack of adequate medical care, food, water, etc.) as there were Israelis killed in the October 7, 2023 attack out of 2.3 million Gazans by CNN's estimate. A significant share of those who have died are innocent civilians and children, although a disproportionate share are, no doubt, genuine Hamas militants. Just under half of Gazans are children (the median age there is 19 years old), and about 40% of the dead are children. Many of the adults who have died in Gaza are innocent civilians as well.

Only about a thousand people in Gaza have been allowed to leave into Egypt side of its border with Gaza, mostly foreign nationals and dual nationals. Only minimal aid has been provided to Gaza from across the Egyptian border. 

Only a few Hamas hostages have been released or confirmed dead or freed, with an estimated 239 of them still held or unaccounted for. There are no serious publicly known negotiations underway for their release, in part, because the people holding them don't seem to have any real representatives in contact with Israel.

Iranian backed Hezbollah militias in Lebanon and Iranian backed Houthi forces in Yemen, have attempted to harry Israelis, mostly ineffectually, with the Houthis destroying one U.S. drone. No governments in the region but Egypt, however, have overtly done anything to help the Gazans.

The Egyptians have provided only the most minimal and grudging support to the Palestinians with whom they have little in common. 

For example, the Arabic dialect spoken in Gaza is only barely intelligible to someone in Egypt, perhaps like someone with a thick South Asian or Scottish accent trying to talk to someone who only knows how to speak in American English.

The future for Gazans doesn't look bright. Israel has declared war on Hamas which was their exclusive legitimate self-government, and their is no clear sense of whether a new form of self-government, foreign Arab administrators, or Israeli martial law, will come next. 

Gaza City is already in ruins and will be far worse when the Israeli campaign is over. One of Gaza City's main hospitals was bombed accidentally by Hamas. They can't emigrate. They continue to have very limited supplies of food, water, medicine, and fuel with no clear timing for relief in sight. Much of their real estate has been ruined and they have mostly fled without their possessions. They were already poor, on average, now, most people there are absolutely destitute. According to one story:

A total of 106 trucks carrying food, water and medical supplies arrived at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza on Wednesday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said, amid growing calls from international aid agencies for a ceasefire to allow more aid into the besieged enclave. The delivery from the Egyptian Red Crescent did not include desperately needed fuel, which Israel has banned from entering Gaza, claiming Hamas would commandeer supplies for military purposes. It brings the total number of aid trucks into Gaza since October 7 to 756, according to the Palestine Red Crescent — a trickle compared to the roughly 455 trucks the UN says entered daily before the war.

Their Hamas leaders absolutely provoked this response and brought this upon their people, and the absolute rabid stance towards Israel that Hamas has taken makes diplomacy with them useless. And, the Gazan people's support was instrumental in bringing Hamas into power there, although the means by which Hamas has remained in power have not been very democratic (although it isn't as if Hamas was particularly unpopular with grass roots Gazans prior to their October 7 strike).

Even before the strike, Gaza has always been in pretty bad shape. It has the demographics of sub-Saharan Africa, something it shares outside of Africa only with Yemen and Afghanistan. It has been under Israeli rule since the "the Nakba," the Arabic term for the expulsion of Palestinians from their towns during the founding of Israel in the late 1940s.

Other Middle Eastern, West Asian, and North African countries have supported them politically and diplomatically, but don't really want to have anything to do with them.

There is no well defined and widely expected end game, and most Gazans are inclined to expect the worst.

It isn't clear what ordinary Gazans think about all of this or who they blame. 

Certainly, they have no love lost for Israel. 

But, despite its dictatorial approach when in power, I suspect that many Gazans, at least privately, harbor pretty negative feelings towards the Hamas leaders who put them in this mess in the first place by serving as Iranian puppets. But maybe I'm wrong and Gazans have rallied around Hamas instead. It is hard to know.