Gaza: 100,000 Palestinians displaced from Deir al-Balah in two days

Successive Israeli evacuation orders have displaced around 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza’s Deir al-Balah in the space of two days, municipal authorities in the central Gaza Strip city announced on Saturday.

The municipality added that 20 shelters have gone out of service due to Israeli shelling and repeated evacuation orders.

Israel has continued to force Palestinians to move from one area to another under evacuation orders since the start of the war on 7 October.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), between 1 July and 21 August, Israel issued 16 evacuation orders, forcibly displacing around 213,000 Palestinians.

UN data also says that nine out of 10 people in Gaza have been displaced in Israeli attacks and indicates that most Palestinians in Gaza are forced to move at least once a month.

International relief organisations said the continued displacement of Palestinians is hampering emergency aid operations, with civilians being left with no safe area.

Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis have been used throughout the duration of the war as key locations for storing essential aid supplies.

The forced evacuation orders mean that aid personnel and emergency service teams have lost access to the aid warehouses and supplies.

The New Arab’s Arabic language sister publication, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, reported that from 8 to 17 August, around 17 health institutions were affected by shelling and evacuation orders.

The orders also mean that vital vaccination drives to target the spread of polio will also be affected. A 10-month-old girl contracted polio in Gaza recently, becoming the first case in the territory for over 25 years, and was paralysed as a result.

Gaza’s Civil Defence on Saturday said the Israeli army has reduced the designated humanitarian zone areas from the start of the war from 230 to 35 square kilometres.

A spokesperson from the Civil Defence said since the ground invasion of Gaza in November, Israeli forces forced hundreds of thousands of civilians in north Gaza to flee to southern areas, claiming they were safe zones.

The spokesperson added that area was reduced from 63 percent of the Strip to 38.8 percent of the Strip by December.

By May, when Israeli forces invaded Rafah, the area was reduced to 20 percent of the Strip. This reduced to 16.4 percent of the Strip by mid June.

Currently, the Israeli army has reduced the humanitarian safe zone to 35 square kilometres, which is equal to 9.5 percent of the total area of the Strip.

Each time the area is reduced in size, Palestinians lose access to agricultural land, roads, streets, essential services and safe shelter areas.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 40,334 Palestinians since October and wounded at least 93,356 others in the same time frame. The bombing has decimated large parts of the Strip, rendering essential infrastructure and services unusable.