Israeli military officials said only one-third of the estimated 1 million Palestinians in Gaza City have left the area following an evacuation order.
Israel launched its long-awaited ground offensive into Gaza’s capital on Tuesday, after issuing an evacuation order for the area weeks ago. Nearly two years into the trudging war, however, Palestinians have grown fatigued and distrustful of evacuation orders. Israeli military spokesman Effie Defrin said Tuesday that only 350,000 Palestinians had left Gaza City since the evacuation order. This means that nearly 650,000 remain in the embattled enclave, far more than the expected 200,000, as ground forces move in alongside an increasingly intense bombardment.
Gaza’s Government Media Office gave an even larger figure: over 1 million, with just 190,000 out of 1.3 million people in Gaza City and northern towns fleeing south since the evacuation order.
A spokesperson with the office said the designated safe areas were inadequate, as they “completely lack the basic necessities of life, with no hospitals, no infrastructure, and no essential services such as water, food, shelter, electricity or education, making living there almost impossible.”
Sources in Gaza’s hospitals told Al Jazeera that 79 people were killed in Gaza City in the opening hours of the ground invasion.
Rescuer Bashir Hajjaj told the outlet that the Israeli offensive consisted of a combined arms push using artillery, helicopters, missiles, drones, and F-16 fighter jets.
“There was heavy bombardment here, and it was difficult to reach people,” he said. “We took out many, many martyrs and wounded people.”
“We’re digging,” Hajjaj added. “We’re breaking the concrete with our hands because there are no tools.”
Israel has blamed civilian casualties on claims that Hamas is forcing Palestinian civilians to stay in the city as human shields. The group has indeed urged Gaza City residents to disobey Israel’s evacuation orders.
“Gaza City is the central hub of Hamas’s military and governing power — their main stronghold,” Defrin said. “Hamas has turned Gaza City into the largest human shield in history.”
Despite their earlier defiance, the entrance of ground troops into Gaza triggered another wave of Palestinian refugees fleeing south. Pictures showed hundreds of civilians with all of their belongings gathered on cars, trucks, motorcycles, donkey carts, and other impromptu modes of transportation traveling down a road south in a massive, crowded column.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Israel was “making efforts at the moment to open additional routes to facilitate a quicker evacuation of the Gaza population and to separate them from those terrorists we want to attack.”
Israeli officials said they were in control of 40% of Gaza City within hours of the invasion. Much of this area has been completely devastated, with satellite images showing that the Zeitoun neighborhood, specifically, had been almost completely razed to the ground. Palestinians remaining in the combat zone will have to navigate a treacherous path through Israeli forces as they seek to root out remaining Hamas guerrillas.
The offensive came the same day as one of the biggest blows to Israel’s image in its modern history. An independent commission gathered by the United Nations accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza after an extensive legal analysis.
“The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” said Chairwoman Navi Pillay, who previously prosecuted perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”
The team alleged that Israel had met four of the five criteria established in the convention to assess whether genocide occurred: killing members of a group, causing them serious mental or bodily harm, imposing measures meant to prevent births in the group, and deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the “physical destruction” of the group. The committee only assessed that Israel had not met the criterion of implementing a forcible transfer of the Palestinian population.
Only one of these criteria needs to be met to rule that an entity is committing genocide. Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and President Isaac Herzog were specifically held to have displayed genocidal intent.
“The Commission concludes that the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” the report concludes.
Israeli officials have often pointed out that the Palestinian population has increased during the supposed genocide and the historically low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in pushing back against such allegations. In addition, the country’s officials point to Hamas using Gazans as human shields by preventing them from leaving despite evacuation warnings and stealing aid and selling it on the black market to fund its terrorist operations.
The Jewish state vehemently rejected the charge in the report, accusing its authors of being antisemitic.
“The report relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others,” a statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry reads. “These fabrications have already been thoroughly debunked, including in an independent, in-depth academic study by BESA, which refuted every single false claim regarding genocide. Needless to say, the three authors made no attempt to address the clear findings of the BESA study.”
Israel’s permanent representative to the U.N., Daniel Meron, derided the inquiry’s report as “scandalous,” “fake,” and a “libellous rant.”
The accusation of genocide does not carry immediate penalties but could drive diplomatic action from other states. This is likely to be countered by the United States, which previously sanctioned figures in the International Criminal Court who investigated Israeli officials for war crimes.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which Hamas oversees, 64,522 Palestinians have been killed in the war and another 163,096 wounded. Israel has denied and criticized these numbers, maintaining that most of those killed have been Hamas fighters or their allies. Roughly 460 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza during combat operations, while another 1,200 Israelis were killed in Hamas’s opening on Oct. 7, 2023.
ISRAEL BEGINS GAZA CITY GROUND OPERATION
A joint investigation last month from the left-wing Israeli +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian revealed that the most respected Israeli intelligence believes it has only killed 8,900 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants, out of a named list of 34,973 Hamas fighters and 12,702 PIJ fighters. This suggests that nearly 83% of those killed in the war in Gaza have been civilians, but an Israeli military spokesperson disputed the data, as have both Israeli and American estimates.
“The figures presented in the article are incorrect and do not reflect the data” available in the Israeli military’s systems, the spokesperson said. “Throughout the war, continuous intelligence assessments are conducted regarding the number of terrorists eliminated in the Gaza Strip, based on [bomb damage assessment] methodologies and cross-checking efforts from various sources … [including] documents originating from terrorist organizations in the Strip.”