Israel is pounding Gaza City with some of the heaviest strikes in two years of war in its bid to force residents to make a perilous and costly journey towards the overcrowded south.
Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesperson, warned Gaza City’s beleaguered population on Friday that it would be deploying “unprecedented force”, telling them to “take this opportunity and join the hundreds of thousands” moving south on al-Rashid coastal road – now the only permitted escape route.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum related “distressing” reports from Gaza City on Friday, with people forced west towards the coastal road unable to rest under the relentless pace of attacks aimed at levelling buildings and infrastructure.
“This current military operation is completely destroying entire blocks, and there are still families who are trapped under the debris of the targeted houses, particularly in the Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood,” said Abu Azzoum, reporting from Nuseirat in central Gaza.
While a growing number of Palestinians may now want to leave, despite their earlier resistance, many are unable to afford the cost of renting a vehicle to take household items and furniture to the overcrowded al-Mawasi area in southern Gaza.
Still, Abu Azzoum said hundreds have embarked on the long journey, many on foot, to al-Mawasi, which has itself come under Israeli attack in the past despite being designated a “safe zone”.
Nivin Ahmed, 50, fled south from Gaza City to the central city of Deir el-Balah on Thursday, walking with seven family members.
“We walked more than 15km [9 miles], we were crawling from exhaustion,” she told the news agency AFP. “My youngest son cried from fatigue. We took turns dragging a small cart with some of our belongings.”
‘Dangerous situation on all levels’
The Israeli military said about 480,000 Palestinians had fled Gaza City since late August, while Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Friday that some 450,000 have been displaced towards the south.
Going on United Nations estimates of some one million people living in the enclave’s largest urban centre at that time, around half the population may already have fled.
However, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said this week that approximately 740,000 people were still in the north of the enclave as of Tuesday.
Israeli forces killed 43 people across the Strip since dawn on Friday, including 26 people in Gaza City, according to medical sources.
Three civilians were killed in an Israeli air strike that targeted a residential house in Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa, close to the Netzarim Corridor, sources told Al Jazeera.
Friday’s death toll also includes two aid seekers who were killed by the Israeli army in southern Gaza.
A medical source at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza told Al Jazeera that a nine-year-old child had died from severe malnutrition in the hospital’s paediatric ward amid the worsening famine in the enclave.
The latest case brings the total number of deaths from Israel’s man-made famine to 441 since the war on Gaza began, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures.
Hospitals are struggling to cope with no fuel having entered the Strip for more than 10 days, according to Amjad Shawa, head of the Palestinian NGOs Network in Gaza.
He said fuel supplies in the besieged enclave will last just 72 hours, portending a “dangerous situation on all levels”.
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