No more room in Gaza’s deadly ‘safe zones’

Muhammad Amin

Israel is escalating attacks against Gaza’s civilians so intensely that all its so-called “safe zones” are full and Palestinians caught outside them now have no place to flee to.
For instance, its weekend attack on the town of Deir al-Balah came with an order to evacuate to the al-Mawasi refugee camp that was set up to accommodate refugees from the Rafah atrocity. When they arrived at the “safe zone”, they found it bursting at the seams and with no space to accommodate them.
“My uncles and father tried to find a new safer place to move our family to but their efforts did not succeed yet as all spaces within the safe zone are occupied,” a 34-year-old woman who has been living with 16 relatives on the edge of the “safe area” told The Guardian.
Humanitarian officials confirmed the overcrowding and warned it was nullifying Israel’s “efforts” to appear to be protecting civilians.
“The absence of space in safe zones means Israel’s evacuation orders are now simply kill orders as they attack whether or not civilians have been able to leave the places targeted for attack,” one aid worker said.
“There’s just no space and people know that, so they stay where they are. You can’t get hold of tents, so even if you found somewhere, it would be difficult to get any shelter, and conditions there are terrible,” said a UN official.

“Some people refuse to move [to al-Mawasi] because they just don’t want to leave their homes but most because they’ll have nowhere to live if they go there.”
An overwhelming majority of Palestinians have been displaced multiple times, and 86% of the enclave has suffered evacuation orders, UN figures show.
And the “safe zones” are able to offer very little besides falling outside Israel’s killing fields. Squatting on a sand dune, Al-Mawasi for example is overflowing with hundreds of thousands of people, despite minimal basic services. Water supply is intermittent, with no sanitation, very basic healthcare and now infectious diseases are on the rise.
And it is “just getting worse and worse”. the UN official said.
Since August 1, the Israeli military had issued nine evacuation orders affecting about 213 000 people, UN figures show. Now, Gazans are “increasingly concentrated” in al-Mawasi, with 30,000 to 34,000 people per square kilometre.
So, most of Gaza’s citizens are now crammed into a 40 sq km space that comprises 11% of Gaza.
Many people are also aware that Israel is not shy of attacking al-Mawasi either.
One airstrike in al-Mawasi in July stunned the world, killed 92 and wounded more than 300 civilians.