Gazans fear a new historic catastrophe after the Israeli ultimatum: "If you stay at home they will kill you; if you go out, too"

"Let's go? Where? To the street? It's too dangerous to go out. And it's just as dangerous to stay home." Farah Abu Abed responds to the call of this newspaper with an exhausted voice, after several days of continuous bombardment on the Gaza Strip that are heard as a background to this interrupted conversation. She is furious after the Israeli ultimatum, which demands that the population of the north of the Strip, where she and her family are, move south within 24 hours. For this 30-year-old woman, leaving everything and fleeing would mean traveling more than 20 kilometers, probably walking, because there are no vehicles for everyone, on bombed roads, without any assurance that they will not be targeted, and taking care of children and the elderly with reduced mobility. In the head of Abu Abed and thousands of Gazans, this Friday a word was repeated: "Nakba", catastrophe in Arabic, a concept that refers to the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians with the creation in 1948 of the State of Israel.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Kholoud Sayed repeated Friday morning from her apartment in Gaza City, where she locked herself in Saturday with her husband and three children after the bloody Hamas attack that killed 1,300 Israelis. "They want to keep our land again, like in 1948. And the world watches and does nothing, does not stop them. I can't express how I feel, I'm desperate and I haven't had an eye for a week. I want to sleep and stop thinking." Hours later, a laconic WhatsApp message announces: "Finally, we are at a friend's house in the south, we decided to run away and wait."

No one is going anywhere. The medical staff is committed to the end with the sick and, moreover, we have nowhere to go.

Medhat Abbas, Palestinian physician

Israel has given 24.1 million Gazans 1 hours to leave their homes and shelters and head to the southern part of the Strip, heading for Egypt, if they want to save their lives. This implies the displacement of half of the population of this small enclave of 365 square kilometers. In the northern part of the Strip is the largest hospital in Gaza, Al Shifa, which is collapsed by the large number of wounded, which already touch 7,000, and has had to take bodies to the parking lot because there is no room in its morgue. "No one is going anywhere. The medical staff is committed to the end with the sick and, besides, we have nowhere to go," Medhat Abbas, director general of the Ministry of Health in Gaza and former doctor at this health center, told this newspaper.

The situation he describes is hard to imagine: a crowded hospital where patients are placed on the floor of operating rooms and emergency rooms, doctors are overwhelmed by a lack of medicines, material and clean water and generators are about to collapse, which could cause the death of some connected patients. For example, people on dialysis and babies who are in incubators. "We need them to open the border now. That doctors and fuel enter, that extremely serious patients leave. We can't take much longer. We have experienced many terrible things, but nothing like this," Abbas pleads.

"Death sentence"

The World Health Organization (WHO) considers that the Israeli demand is "a death sentence" for many patients. In a statement, the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), present in Gaza, condemned the Israeli ultimatum to the inhabitants of the north of the Strip. "It represents an attack on health care and goes against any principle of humanity. We are talking about more than a million human beings. The violence we are seeing is unprecedented. Gaza is being razed to the ground and thousands of people are dying. This must end now," the NGO said.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated territories in the world (about 5,500 people per square kilometer, that is, more than 60 times the average in Spain) and half of the population is under 18 years old. Their lives are marked by the conflict and the Israeli blockade, imposed in 2007, when Hamas seized power. Most of them have never set foot outside this small enclave in which the air and the possibilities of working are lacking, where the options of building a decent future or having some leisure are almost nil. The UN defines the blockade as "collective punishment" and its Secretary-General, António Guterres, has stated that these restrictions are contrary to international humanitarian law.

"It's another Nakba. It's inhumane, there are no words," Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), said by phone. Some 70 per cent of Gazans are refugees or descendants of Gazans who had to leave their homes 75 years ago. "I'm not going anywhere," adds the lawyer, whose family has been in Gaza for generations, in a tired voice.

Palestinians interviewed by this newspaper on Friday said that for now the movement to the south is not massive and that "hundreds of people" would have taken the road to the south. "The fear in Gaza, where 70% of the population is refugees, is that this is the first step to expel the population to Egypt. Many fear another permanent expulsion," the British NGO Medical Aid for Palestinian, which provides health aid in the occupied territories, said in a statement.

Georgette Mohammed has been sheltering in an uncle's house all week with 150 other people. They are crammed into four small apartments in conditions that worsen by the day. The news also comes to them in droppers. "Hamas-linked media say this news [Israel's evacuation warning as a prelude to a possible ground invasion] is false. It's true? Is it happening? I don't know what to believe, but for now we're going to stay here," she says, frightened, in a call from this newspaper.

Communications with Gaza are worsening by the hour. Since Wednesday, the Strip has had no electricity, after Israel cut off the supply and the local power station stopped working for lack of fuel, and internet connections are very unstable, as the local telecommunications company has been bombed. The inhabitants of the enclave are increasingly uninformed and isolated, among their own families and friends and with their contacts outside Gaza. Trying to locate someone over the phone can take hours.

These Israeli announcements are the excuse for new massacres. Then they will argue, 'We told them to leave.'

Ahmed Hamdan, Palestinian-Spanish

"I've been watching atrocities all week and I'm very scared for my family. I'm thinking of moving her south, because I've already lost several relatives this week," said Mohammed Abed, a photographer for a news agency. "I'm working like an animal, I don't feel anything, I don't think... I'm like a robot. Right now, there is no safe place in Gaza: if you stay at home, you are killed; If you go out on the street, they kill you too. So, I better keep working and at least try to tell what happens, "he says.

International law states that civilians who are unable or unwilling to flee remain civilians and cannot be targeted. And that attacking forces must take all feasible precautions to avoid loss of life, including calling off an attack.

For the Hamdan family, the last hope is the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem. The parents, both university professors, and their seven children are Spanish and have been waiting for days for news of a possible evacuation, as was already organized in the Israeli offensive of 2014. Ahmed, one of the sons of the family, who has lived for a few years in Valencia, feels short of breath when he has no news of his parents for hours.

"Our house in Beit Hanoun, in the north of the Gaza Strip, was bombed on Monday and since then they have changed shelter twice. I barely manage to talk to them and the shelling doesn't stop. How are they going to go out on the street like this? And besides, where would they go?" he asks. "These Israeli announcements are the excuse for further killings. Then they will argue, 'We told them to leave.'"

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