The Israel Defense Forces expect roughly 200,000 Palestinians to defy the evacuation order for Gaza City, representing roughly 20% of the current population.
Israel has issued multiple evacuation orders for targeted areas of Gaza during its invasion, sending nearly the entire population back and forth across the embattled enclave. As the IDF prepares to seize Gaza City fully, it has issued an evacuation order for the area. With most of Gaza destroyed, the IDF is finding that evacuation orders are less effective than earlier in the war.
Israel blamed Hamas for preventing Palestinians from fleeing Gaza City, claiming they set up checkpoints to prevent residents from escaping. Hamas has called on residents of Gaza City to disobey the evacuation order.
In the first three days after Gaza City was declared a combat zone on Friday, only about 14,840 Palestinians heeded the evacuation order, according to the joint humanitarian body Site Management Cluster. IDF officials estimated that 70,000-80,000 Palestinians fled as of Wednesday, still a minuscule fraction of the estimated one million Palestinians the United Nations estimates currently reside in Gaza City.
IDF officials are looking to go forward with their Gaza City invasion plans, but estimate that one-fifth of the area’s civilian population will remain in the area.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned that the sudden evacuation of Gaza City’s one million residents is impossible to do safely.
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Israel previously issued an evacuation order for Gaza City on Oct. 13, 2023, just a week after the war began, in preparation for its ground invasion on Oct. 27, 2023. Palestinians returned to the devastated city after the January ceasefire, but the city has come under sustained bombardment after the ceasefire broke down in March.
Analysts noted the decreased effectiveness of evacuation orders by August 2024, due to their frequency and widespread destruction of the strip. The refusal of Palestinians to evacuate is likely to further exacerbate civilian casualties as the IDF storms Gaza’s capital once again.
Among those defying the evacuation order are many of the enclave’s scant remaining Christians, most of whom have taken shelter in several churches in Gaza City. They hope that Israel will avoid targeting churches, particularly due to international pressure from the Vatican and the largely Christian United States.
The Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third oldest operating church in the world, and the Anglican St. Philip’s Church were included in the Friday evacuation order. A joint statement from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, released three days before the broadest evacuation order on Friday, denounced the evacuation orders from Israel. The clergy have vowed to defy the evacuation order.
“Since the outbreak of the war, the Greek Orthodox compound of Saint Porphyrius and the Holy Family compound have been a refuge for hundreds of civilians… Leaving Gaza City and trying to flee to the south would be nothing less than a death sentence. For this reason, the clergy and nuns have decided to remain and continue to care for all those who will be in the compounds,” they said.
Custos of the Holy Land, Fr. Francesco Ielpo, OFM, confirmed in a Tuesday statement on social media that the clergy in affected churches were following through on their promises.
The clergy “have chosen not to abandon their flock — through their physical presence beside the weakest and most vulnerable, and through the Word of the One who knows that only Love conquers hatred, vengeance, and death,” Ielpo added.
The Holy Family Church in Gaza City, the strip’s only Catholic Church, wasn’t included in Friday’s order, but many taking refuge there fear it will be next.
“We came to the church because it feels like the only safe place left, a place where we can be together and find help. Its ties abroad give us some protection,” Moussa Saad Ayyad, 41, a Christian taking refuge in the church, told Al Jazeera. “But if the danger gets worse, each of us may have no choice but to flee south on their own.”
Maryam al-Omr, 69, took refuge in the Holy Family Church after her home was destroyed. She vowed to Al Jazeera, “I will not leave here, even if it means dying. This church is my last home, and I will not abandon it.”
Gaza’s pre-war Christian population was just over 1,000, but the church plays an outsized role in society due to its international connections and sheltering of refugees during the current war.
The IDF is trying multiple heavy-handed efforts to force Gaza City’s residents to flee. One method, Haaretz reported, is to fire shells at unpopulated areas near Gaza City to spook residents into fleeing. Another is to cut off aid from areas under evacuation orders.
Though most residents remain, IDF Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir announced Tuesday that the IDF had begun its offensive to seize Gaza City. Scores of people have been killed and hundreds wounded over the past several days, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is overseen by Hamas. Locals speaking with the Israeli Haaretz reported that Tuesday night was the deadliest night in Gaza City in weeks.
The same day as the evacuation order on Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to flatten Gaza City if Hamas didn’t surrender.
“Soon, the gates of hell will open on the heads of Hamas’ murderers and rapists in Gaza – until they agree to Israel’s conditions for ending the war, primarily the release of all hostages and their disarmament. If they do not agree – Gaza, the capital of Hamas, will become Rafah and Beit Hanoun. Exactly as I promised – so it will be,” he said in a post on X.
As the war nears its second year, Hamas has been degraded but is still standing. Though most of its leadership has been killed, thousands of its fighters have been killed, and much of its infrastructure destroyed, influxes of new recruits have kept it fighting. Its vast tunnel network allows it to continually regroup and mount new attacks against IDF troops.
By most estimates, the ongoing war in Gaza is bloodier than all other rounds of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians combined. Gaza’s Health Ministry claims that 64,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023, a figure heavily disputed by the Israeli government. Israel’s own figures are much lower, and hold that most of those killed have been Hamas terrorists.
Israel has faced renewed scrutiny over its conduct over the summer, after reports of starvation began emerging from Gaza.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said last month that half a million Gaza residents were “facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death,” 1.07 million were experiencing a food emergency, and the remaining 396,000 were in a food crisis, citing “reasonable evidence.” It warned that if conditions didn’t change dramatically within a month, one-third of Gaza’s population could experience famine, with most of the remainder experiencing a food emergency.
The IPC report found that food security varied by area — Gaza City was hit the worst, with 30% experiencing the IPC’s worst food security classification, Phase 5, crossing the line into famine.
Israel vehemently rejected the findings, accusing the IPC of fabricating data and changing its criteria to fabricate a narrative.
“The IPC released a fabricated, Hamas-driven report by lowering its famine threshold from 30% to 15% and ignoring death rate criteria. There is no famine in Gaza: over 100,000 aid trucks have entered, food is abundant, and prices have sharply dropped. The IPC’s forecasts on Gaza have repeatedly proven false, and this assessment will also be discarded as political propaganda,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
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A United Nations report in August found that Gaza’s healthcare system was in a “catastrophic” state, with no remaining hospitals fully functioning and less than half partially functioning. Israel maintains that Hamas uses public health infrastructure for military operations.
Last week, the IDF confirmed the deaths of 456 soldiers during its ground offensive in Gaza. Another 329 were killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack, along with 58 police officers. Roughly 1,200 Israelis altogether were killed in Hamas’s opening attack, most of them civilians.