Throughout its nearly six-month offensive in Gaza, the Israeli military has largely relied on announcing evacuation orders for large areas through leaflets, text messages or loudspeakers, urging people to leave before ground assaults.The past weeks’ campaign of evacuations in Gaza City has been more aggressive and direct, Euro-Med director Ramy Abdu said: Troops went door to door to expel people or sent detained Palestinians to tell residents to leave. The monitor estimates some 7,000 people were forced from neighbourhoods around Shifa, where fighting left wide-scale destruction.Israel vowed to destroy Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel killed some 1,200 people. Israel’s assault has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians, more than 13,000 of them children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and driven some 80% of its 2.3 million people from their homes.Al-Haddad, a pharmacist, and her husband, Raed al-Tabaa, an accountant and university professor, had been determined to stay in Gaza City even as Israel’s ground offensive flattened large swaths of northern Gaza.They fled their home after it took a direct hit in November and moved into the building where her brother-in-law lived, less than a kilometre (0.6 miles) from Shifa Hospital.After the raid at Shifa began on March 19, al-Haddad said the family heard people screaming or calling for help at her building’s entrance. Her family huddled in stairways or the middle of the apartment for cover from gunfire outside as tanks rolled down their street.On the night of March 20, al-Haddad sent a voice message to family members who had already fled south, saying tanks were at their doorstep.”We are OK because we are alive, but we are very shaken up,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to say. We are deprived of any humanity anyone can imagine.”Then it was her family’s turn. At 2:30 a.m., the family was awakened by an explosion as troops blasted open their building’s entrance. Hearing them coming up the stairs, the family opened their apartment door to avoid another explosion. The troops searched the apartment and checked if anyone was on military wanted lists. Then they ordered the family out.In a mix of broken English and Arabic, the family pleaded to be allowed to stay or at least to wait until morning, saying the journey was impossible for the elderly in-laws, al-Haddad said.The soldiers said that “by daylight, the whole building could be blown up,” she said. “They said, ‘You will leave. We will stay.'”The soldiers showed them the route to follow on Google Maps and told them how to walk: A woman carrying a glow stick must lead the group, with another woman at the back, and the men, children and elderly in the middle. They said to wave the glow sticks when approaching a checkpoint in the dark so the soldiers would not be suspicious and would know they have been checked.They were allowed to take a bicycle to carry a few bags and a wheelchair for al-Haddad’s mother-in-law. But it proved impossible to push the wheelchair down the roads littered with belongings people could no longer carry.Her in-laws, in their 80s and 70s, were forced to walk some of the distance, falling numerous times as soldiers shouted at them to keep moving, she said. At 2 p.m., they reached an Israeli checkpoint, where soldiers had them pass one-by-one through a metal gate and look into a security camera, clearly collecting information on everyone going through, al-Haddad said.Now in Rafah, they are crowded into a house with her brothers, their wives and their children—more than 15 people, sleeping five in a room.Al-Haddad said they were thinking of where to go if Israeli troops attacked Rafah, where more than 1.2 million people have crowded. They’re gathering money to buy a way out of Gaza—”to save my children’s future,” she said. “This is a trip like no other. We have started our displacement journey,” al-Haddad said.
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