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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