The Israeli army told residents of several neighbourhoods in the northern part of Gaza to flee on Friday, ahead of a new military operation following repeated rocket attacks.
People should go to shelters west of the city of Gaza, according to an appeal issued by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman in Arabic.
Amid ongoing shelling from the area, the IDF plans to take action against the Palestinian Islamist Hamas and other terrorist organisations there.
Aid organizations are increasingly critical of the IDF’s repeated calls for civilians in the Gaza Strip to flee.
“The constant evacuation orders are wearing down families in Gaza and massively hindering life-saving aid,” said Martin Frick, head of the Berlin office of the UN World Food Programme. “Almost everyone in Gaza has been displaced by the successive evacuation orders since October 2023.”
Overall, about 86% of the embattled coastal strip is an evacuation area, he said. In August alone, numerous calls to flee affected a quarter of a million people. “Some families are fleeing for the tenth time.”
People are hungry and disease is spreading in the few places where people seek shelter, he said. The areas are also intensely overcrowded, the agency says. “This daily horror has become an alarming normality,” said Frick.
The IDF said two projectiles were fired from the northern Gaza Strip towards the Israeli border town of Sderot in the early evening. One was intercepted while the other landed in an open area. Reports of injuries were not initially available.
Dozens of militants killed in combat in the Gaza Strip
Dozens of militants have been killed by Israeli forces in close combat in the Gaza Strip since Thursday, the Israeli army said on Friday.
The military destroyed what it called terrorist infrastructure during battles in the city of Khan Younis in the south of the coastal territory and in the area of Deir al-Balah further north.
Israel’s air force also fired on positions from which rockets were fired at Israel.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that several civilians had been killed as a result of Israeli attacks.
In northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon, there were also renewed exchanges of fire between the army and the Islamist Hezbollah militia.
None of the information could be independently verified.
The war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, has displaced some 90% of the population of Gaza, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Some 2.2 million people live in the coastal strip. Many have been displaced multiple times, according to the UN.
Ceasefire efforts set to continue
Meanwhile, mediation efforts for a ceasefire are set to continue in Cairo. According to media reports, the main point of contention is Hamas’ demand for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects this.
UN representatives have called for a ceasefire at least to allow health workers to issue polio vaccinations for the hundreds of thousands of children in the war zone.
Charity Save the Children warned on Thursday that if left unchecked, the polio outbreak in Gaza would set back global eradication efforts.