A senior Israeli military official said on Wednesday that authorities estimated that an imminent offensive in the Gaza Strip would displace one million Palestinians, planning a new ‘humanitarian area’ for them.
The vast majority of Gaza’s more than two million people have been displaced at least once during nearly two years of war.
The Israeli military has been gearing up to seize Gaza City, the Palestinian territory’s largest urban centre, with the United Nations estimating that nearly a million people live in and around the northern city.
A senior official from COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body that oversees civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said that in recent days, ‘we saw a movement of people from the north to the south.’
‘Until now, approximately 70,000’ Gazans left the north, the official said, briefing journalists on condition of anonymity.
Without giving a specific timeframe, the official said Israeli authorities expected ‘a million people’ to flee south.
In late August, an Israeli military spokesman said the evacuation of Gaza City was ‘inevitable’, while the Red Cross has warned that any Israeli attempt to do so would be impossible in a safe and dignified manner.
The Israeli official said that ‘we want to identify a humanitarian area’ which would be formally announced in the coming days.
The area would extend from a cluster of refugee camps in central Gaza to the southern area of Al-Mawasi and eastwards.
Israel had designated the coastal area of Al-Mawasi a humanitarian zone in the early days of the war, but has repeatedly struck it since.
In mid-August, UN human rights office spokesman Thameen al-Kheetan said Palestinians in Al-Mawasi had ‘little or no access to essential services and supplies, including food, water, electricity and tents’.
A statement from COGAT last week announced a raft of preparations for ‘moving the population southward for their protection’, including a new water line from Egypt to Al-Mawasi, repair works on Israeli water lines, and the connection of a power line to a southern desalination plant.
COGAT also said work had begun to reopen the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis, which has been closed for several weeks following a military operation which Israel said killed Hamas’s presumed leader in Gaza, Mohammed Sinwar.
Meanwhile, at least 21,000 children in Gaza have been disabled since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, 2023, a United Nations committee said Wednesday.
Around 40,500 children have suffered ‘new war-related injuries’ in the nearly two years since the war erupted, with more than half of them left disabled, said the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Reviewing the situation in the Palestinian territories, it said Israeli evacuation orders during the army’s offensive in Gaza were ‘often inaccessible’ to people with hearing or visual impairments, ‘rendering evacuation impossible’.
‘Reports also described people with disabilities being forced to flee in unsafe and undignified conditions, such as crawling through sand or mud without mobility assistance,’ it said.
Meanwhile the committee said the restrictions on humanitarian aid being brought into the Gaza Strip were disproportionately impacting the disabled.
‘People with disabilities faced severe disruptions in assistance, leaving many without food, clean water, or sanitation and dependent on others for survival,’ it said.
While the private US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has four distribution points across the territory, the UN system it has largely replaced had about 400.
Physical obstacles, such as war debris and the loss of mobility aids under the rubble, have further prevented people from reaching the relocated aid points.
The committee said 83 per cent of disabled people had lost their assistive devices, with most unable to afford alternatives such as donkey carts.
It voiced concern that devices like wheelchairs, walkers, canes, splints and prosthetics were considered ‘dual-use items’ by the Israeli authorities and were therefore not included in aid shipments.
The committee called for the delivery of ‘massive humanitarian aid to persons with disabilities’ affected by the war, while insisting that all sides needed to adopt protection measures for the disabled to prevent ‘further violence, harm, deaths and deprivation of rights’.
The committee said it had been informed of at least 157,114 people sustaining injuries, with over 25 per cent at risk of life-long impairments, between October 7, 2023 and August 21 this year.
It said there were ‘at least 21,000 children with disabilities in Gaza as a result of impairments, acquired since October 7, 2023’.
It said Israel should adopt specific measures for protecting children with disabilities from attacks, and implement evacuation protocols that take into account persons with disabilities.
Israel should ensure disabled people are ‘allowed to return safely to their homes and are assisted in doing so’, it added.
