"For the millionth time, the Israeli army is asking us to suddenly leave our houses, without even giving us time to take our belongings with us," Asmaa Abu Teir said angrily to The New Arab as she hurried along a destroyed road under the intense heat, hoping to escape and survive.
"What do [the Israeli army] want from us? Where do we go? How do we survive? And how long will we continue to live under these tragic conditions?" Asmaa added, as sweat poured over her face.
Asmaa, the 39-year-old mother of four, has been forced to leave more than ten times since the Israeli army began its war on the Gaza Strip last October. She lost her home in the town of Abasan town, east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
During that same bombing, Asmaa's three brothers and four of her relatives were killed. "After that, we went to Mawasi Khan Younis at first, but the Israeli bombing attacked the UNRWA barracks and my sister died," she recalled.
Subsequently, Asmaa was forced to leave with her elderly mother to Mawasi in Rafah city and move between tents, always trying to stay away from dangerous areas before the Israeli army allowed them to return to the eastern areas.
"Every time the Israeli army tells us that the place we are going to is 'a safe humanitarian area', I lose someone from my family or relatives [...] I am very tired and feel exhausted [...] What should I do to get rid of this nightmare?" she said.
Asmaa is but one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to leave shelter, often multiple times, under orders by the Israeli army. The evacuation order of the eastern areas is the second in just weeks, according to local and Palestinian security sources.
Some of the main and side streets east of Khan Yunis were crowded with a flood of families, including men, women and children, who left their homes under attack in search of a safe place, according to the sources.
As usual, the Israeli army offered no time for Palestinian families to safely escape, as its warplanes and artillery instantly pounded the streets and residential homes, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, according to medical sources at Nasser Hospital.
"The majority of the victims are children, women and civilian men... What is happening in the eastern areas and all the Gaza Strip is a war of extermination against civilians," medical sources told TNA.
Collective Punishment
Mohammed Abu Al-Ata, 25, lost 10 members of his family in the Al-Mawasi massacre at Khan Yunis committed by the Israeli army on 13 July. He now "wishes for death at every moment, so at least he can go to his family in the afterlife".
"My mother felt that she would inevitably die in this damned war and that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip […] I wish I had not left Gaza City and that I had stayed there as long as death would continue to pursue us everywhere," he remarked to TNA.
Abu al-Ata was displaced from Gaza City last November after the army attacked his neighbourhood. His displacement continued throughout endless shelling.
"I tried to escape with my family many times, but the army killed them all and left me alone," he said.
"Everywhere we fled, we saw death and tried to escape again and again, but we did not succeed […] Only I survived, but I remained without any desire to live," he added.
In the Khan Yunis massacre, in which the Israeli army targeted the tents of the displaced with heavy missiles, killing at least 90 Palestinians and wounding more than 310, mostly women and children, according to data issued by the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
"Israel is using the method of collective punishment against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas and the resistance factions politically," Mustafa Ibrahim, a Gaza-based political expert, said to TNA.
"The main goal of this collective punishment is to humiliate all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and convince them that there is no safe place in the Strip, whether during wartime or even after it, and that Israel is the only one who can provide them with safety (if it wants to)," he added.
Ibrahim explained that Palestinian human rights organizations and Palestinian international institutions should pursue Israel legally at the international level to be officially punished for the crimes against humanity it committed in the Gaza Strip.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor also stressed that Israel is adopting a policy of collective punishment through its insistence on escalating its military attacks that deliberately target Palestinian civilians and expanding the geographical area of attacks to include all areas of the Gaza Strip.
"This policy violates the most established rules of international law and is mandatory, both customary and written, to the extent that it amounts to committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, in addition to the crime of genocide," the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a press statement.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor stressed that Israel's systematic and widespread targeting of civilian sites, especially cultural and religious, which caused large numbers of victims and inflicting destruction and material losses is "a form of revenge and collective punishment violates international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions (1949), and amounts to war crimes according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court."
"In addition, inflicting any serious physical or mental harm on civilians, and deliberately subjecting them to living conditions intended to destroy them, constitutes a grave violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) and relevant case law," the Euro-Med elaborated.
According to a recent Lancet study, the death toll in Gaza could be at least 186,000 dead due to direct and indirect impacts of Israel's war on Gaza.