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Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Israel forcibly displaces tens of thousands from Gaza City into deadly 'safe-zones'

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from Gaza City in northern Gaza and are on the move with nowhere to go due to new evacuation orders issued by Israel. 

The Israeli army dropped leaflets across Gaza City on 10 July, ordering all its residents to leave, saying the area was a “dangerous combat zone.” The leaflets identified several routes to “safe zones” in central Gaza.
Yet the UN and reporters on the ground say nowhere is safe, and that Israeli bombardment continues across the strip. Since the start of the war in October, Israeli jets have repeatedly attacked the “safe zones” it instructs displaced Gazans to move to.
Dozens have been killed in Gaza’s designated safe zones over the past 24 hours.
“People continue to flee from a place to another looking for safety, but nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip. No school. No hospital. No UN building,” UNRWA said on Wednesday.
Israel initially ordered the evacuation of Gaza City’s residents on 27 June, when the army pushed back into Shujaiya neighborhood and other areas of the city, months after claiming that Hamas had been dismantled in the northern strip.
Since then, brutal bombing attacks across Gaza City have been ongoing as the army continues taking heavy losses in fierce battles against the resistance, most prominently in Shujaiya and Tal al-Hawa.
Thousands of people were displaced on 8 July as Israeli forces pushed ahead with ground operations in Gaza City.
Thousands were also forced to flee in the southern city of Khan Yunis on 3 July as a result of Israeli evacuation orders.
According to the UN, 1.9 million Palestinians – approximately 80 percent of the Gaza Strip’s territory – are now displaced.
The new evacuation order comes one day after at least 30 Palestinians were killed and over 50 injured in an Israeli airstrike on a school in Khan Yunis. This was the fourth Israeli attack on schools in Gaza within just four days.
Israeli attacks across Gaza on Tuesday killed at least 77 Palestinians.
 
Julia Conley
July 9, 2024
Disputing the repeated claims of Israeli officials and their vehement supporters in the Biden administration who have scoffed at concerns that the Israel Defense Forces are targeting civilians in Gaza, in-depth reporting on Monday based on the testimony of six former IDF soldiers described how they were encouraged to fire their weapons to relieve “boredom” and felt “authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will, including civilians.”
In their latest investigative report on the IDF’s rules of engagement in Gaza, Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call interviewed six soldiers who had been released from active duty.
Medical providers and eyewitnesses have described the shooting of Palestinian women and children by Israeli snipers, and footage has shown unarmed Palestinians being executed while walking along a road. The soldiers confirmed that the IDF has been operating with “total freedom of action,” as one said, since October.
“If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain—you just shoot,” said a soldier identified as B.
If troops see a person approaching and don’t know whether they are armed or pose a threat, “it is permissible to shoot at their center of mass [their body], not into the air… It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman,” said B.
The soldiers said they sometimes fired their weapons as “a way to blow off steam or relieve the dullness of their daily routine,” with one reservist saying that they wanted “to experience the event [fully].”
The reservist described shooting “for no reason” at times, “into the sea or at the sidewalk or an abandoned building,” while a soldier identified as S. told +972 and Local Call that the IDF would engage in a tactic called “demonstrating presence,” in which they would repeatedly fire their weapons to show any Palestinians in the area that they were there.
They would “shoot a lot, even for no reason — anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots,” said S.
The report follows the publication of an analysis by medical experts in The Lancet, who said the death toll in Gaza — officially over 38,000 — could be off by roughly 150,000 people due to the deaths of Palestinians who have starved, died of medical conditions that couldn’t be treated due to the destruction of the healthcare system, and succumbed to other “indirect” impacts of the war.
Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian said that the confessions of the Israeli soldiers to +972 only confirm what “has been clear since the beginning.”
“Israeli soldiers in Gaza are operating under the premise that they can kill anything that moves and that every Palestinian is fair game for slaughter,” she said.
The soldiers also described “routinely” executing Palestinian civilians because they had entered an area designated a “no-go zone” by the IDF, and allowing their surroundings to become “littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals.”
The soldiers were instructed to hide the bodies when international aid groups arrived, to ensure that “images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out.”
S. said they “saw a lot of civilians — families, women, children,” and confirmed that “there are more fatalities than are reported.”
“Every day, at least one or two [civilians] are killed [because] they walked in a no-go area. I don’t know who is a terrorist and who is not, but most of them did not carry weapons,” they said.
B told +972 and Local Call that the army suspects any male between the ages of 16 and 50 of being a terrorist, and treats anyone walking around outside or looking at the IDF from a building as suspicious — and a legitimate target.
“You shoot,” said B. “The [army’s] perception is that any contact [with the population] endangers the forces, and a situation must be created in which it is forbidden to approach [the soldiers] under any circumstances.”
The report follows previous revelations from the Israeli news outlets on the IDF’s use of artificial intelligence to target Palestinians, with little regard for civilians who might be killed when suspected Hamas members were attacked in their homes.
A soldier identified as A. said that working alongside commanders in an operations room and determining which buildings should be struck “felt like a computer game.”
“I, too, a rather left-wing soldier, forget very quickly that these are real homes,” said A.
“Only after two weeks did I realize that these are [actual] buildings that are falling: if there are inhabitants [inside], then [the buildings are collapsing] on their heads.”
Yuval Green, who served in the 55th Paratroopers Brigade late last year and signed a letter with 40 other reservists last month refusing to take part in the invasion of Rafah, testified that soldiers were ordered to burn down homes that they had occupied.
“If you move, you have to burn down the house,” he said, adding that the policy did not make sense to him in an operation that was supposedly aimed at targeting Hamas.
“We are in these houses not because they belong to Hamas operatives, but because they serve us operationally,” Green said. “It is a house of two or three families — to destroy it means they will be homeless.”
Policy analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa addressed those who might be surprised that “Israeli soldiers would so readily admit their war crimes.”
“It’s simple,” Kenney-Shawa said. “They’ve never faced any consequences. They are only rewarded for their massacres.”
Yael Berta of the Middle East Initiative said the latest dispatch from +972 regarding the orders IDF soldiers are given is likely just a fraction of the truth that will eventually come out about the war in Gaza.
“I am pretty sure we don’t know half of what went on during these nine months in Gaza,” she said.

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