People were walking or on donkey carts as they left areas east of Deir al-Balah. Some were in private cars, loaded with their belongings, including mattresses and blankets, water and gas bottles. The streets appear littered with leaflets dropped by the IDF reiterating the order to evacuate.
It now amounts to 39 square kilometers, just over 10 percent of Gaza’s total area.
Amid the latest evacuation, people swarmed onto a UN truck carrying food aid, carrying off small bags of aid.
A woman named Um Alaa, sitting on a cart, said it was the fourth time she has had to evacuate since October last year. “We don’t know where to go. We are going to look for a spot away from this dangerous place. The whole of Gaza has become dangerous.”
There was panic among some as to what might come next.
An elderly man said: “There are no longer places to go. There was only Deir al-Balah, and now they are asking us to evacuate Deir al-Balah. I am afraid that tomorrow they will confine all of us on the seashore of Deir al-Balah, then exterminate all of us.”
“After so many displacements, we no longer have the strength to evacuate yet another time.”
Um Ismail, a woman with small children, said people were defenseless.
“Why are they fighting us? We are not Hamas, we are simply people staying put in our homes. They displaced us not once, but 10 times. Why? What have we done?”
A woman in the back seat of a car exclaimed: “Do you want to know what’s happening – ask Hamas and the Israelis if you want to know what’s happening to us.”
Her family said it was their second displacement. For a very few, it was the first time since the conflict began that they’d had to move.
One man was crying as he drove a car packed with women and children. “I have no idea where we are heading to. Anywhere we can stay. God help us. This is the first time I am being displaced.”
But for Umm Said it was the seventh move in as many months.
“I don’t know where I am heading to. They said leave, we left. We have no idea…Every time we find a place and settle down, they say go back. And here we are. I have taken some flour for the children, what else can I take with me!”
Abu Muhammad Hajjaj, a resident of Gaza City, had been displaced from the Shujaiya neighborhood.
“People are crying and complaining of everything: disease, hunger, poverty, lack of hygiene, lack of medicine. You search in all of Gaza for paracetamol for a headache and you can’t find it.”
Hajjaj added: “Find us a solution. This is not a way to live. Where are the international organisations, where is the Security Council, where is the UN.”
“We don’t have money. We don’t have tents. We have nothing. We are not living in our own homes. We are on the street. They cannot keep on telling us to evacuate from here and there. This is not a way to live.”