Thousands of Palestinians are fleeing through the devastated streets of Gaza City, hoping to find refuge further south after an injunction from Israel, which is preparing for a ground offensive. “This is only the beginning” of Israeli operations in Gaza, warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday, October 13, on the seventh day of the war, triggered by the attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel and which has already left at least 1,300 dead on the Israeli side and around 1,900 on the Palestinian side. The Israeli army, which responded with intensive strikes on the Gaza Strip, also announced on Friday that it had carried out ground incursions there.
Calls are growing around the world to avoid a “humanitarian catastrophe”, after Israel’s call to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza Strip, which concerns around 1.1 million inhabitants out of a total of 2, 4 million. “Even wars have rules,” recalled UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, calling for “immediate” humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip. He described a “health system on the brink of collapse,” “overflowing morgues” and “a water crisis.”
US President Joe Biden assured that “the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza was “a priority”, while several NGOs also called for the opening of humanitarian corridors. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, called for “stopping the bloodshed,” warning that a possible ground assault on Gaza would lead to “absolutely unacceptable civilian casualties.”
Strike targeting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon
Tension is also high on the northern border of the country. The Israeli army claimed on the night of Friday to Saturday to have struck a Hezbollah target in southern Lebanon in response to “the infiltration of unidentified aerial objects” and “fire on an army drone air “. Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian movement allied with Hamas, said on Friday it was “fully prepared” to intervene against Israel “at the right moment”. A video journalist from the Reuters agency was also killed and six other journalists from Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Al-Jazeera injured on Friday in bombings in southern Lebanon.
In the West Bank, at least 16 Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli forces during rallies in solidarity with the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Thousands of people also demonstrated Friday in Beirut, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Bahrain in support of the Palestinians.
In Gaza, the sound of explosions is incessant. More than 423,000 Palestinians had already left their homes as of Thursday, according to the UN, which launched an emergency appeal for donations. On Friday morning, the Israeli army called on all civilians in Gaza City to “evacuate their homes to the south, for their own safety.” Since then, according to the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), tens of thousands of people have further fled their homes in Gaza and moved south. By the thousands, carrying their backpacks, they fled by all means, on foot, piled up on trailers, on carts, on motorcycles, by car, through streets strewn with rubble, lined with ruined buildings. Leaflets in Arabic, dropped by Israeli drones, called on residents to leave their homes “immediately.” Hamas rejected this call.
A “second Nakba”, according to Mahmoud Abbas
The Gaza Strip, a territory of 362 km2, has been subject to an Israeli land, air and sea blockade since Hamas took power there. Egypt controls its only opening to the world, the Rafah crossing point, which is currently closed. Subjected to a “complete siege” since October 9, the enclave is now deprived of water, electricity and food supplies, cut off by Israel. According to the official Emirati news agency WAM, the United Arab Emirates on Friday sent a plane carrying emergency medical aid to El-Arich (Egypt), which is to be transported to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned against “any attempt to displace Palestinians,” stressing that the conflict “must not spread to neighboring countries.” Saudi Arabia, for its part, declared on Friday that it “categorically” rejected any displacement of the population of Gaza, its strongest criticism of Israel since the attack launched by Hamas. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas likened such a “displacement” to a “second Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic), the name given to the flight of some 760,000 Palestinians at the creation of the State of Israel .