It was five a.m. on October 13, 2023 when Omar, a father who lived on Yarmouk Street, north of Gaza, woke up to Israeli bombing. “I jumped out of my apartment and tried to get out,” Omar told Human Rights Watch (HRW), recalling how he tried to escape after the impact of two bombs that shook his building. Without having received a prior evacuation order, Omar lost four members of his family, including his six-year-old son.
Omar is one of the many testimonies collected in the report “Desperate, hungry and besieged: Forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel” that HRW published this Thursday. The NGO accuses the Israeli government of committing war crimes due to the massive displacement of 90% of the Gazan population: 1.9 million people were displaced in October 2024, according to the UN. “There is no compelling and plausible military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of almost the entire population of Gaza, often on multiple occasions,” HRW says.
Confused evacuation orders
Since October 8, 2023, a day after Hamas’s attack on Israel, the Israeli military has issued at least 184 evacuation orders in Gaza, according to HRW. One of the most sweeping orders was issued on October 13, forcing more than a million people to leave their homes. Despite the bombing in the early hours of the day, HRW verified that the general evacuation order was not sent until 7:15 a.m., when Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee shared it on his account Facebook.
“The evacuation of civilians should be a measure of last resort and must provide security guarantees,” says the HRW report, which questions the effectiveness of evacuation protocols, calling them “confusing and contradictory.” Testimonies highlight that communications were inaccessible to most civilians, who deliberately faced power and internet outages. “We had no way of knowing what to do or where to go,” recalled Ghassan, a resident of Jabalia, whose neighborhood was bombed just hours after Israel dropped evacuation leaflets.
“The Israeli evacuation system has seriously harmed the population and often served only to sow fear and anxiety,” HRW says in its new report. The NGO says this system has proven ineffective, although Israel has maintained that the evacuation orders were intended to protect Palestinian civilians.
First, the system assumed that all Gaza residents had coverage, signal, and phones with sufficient battery to receive alerts. The day before, on October 12, Israel Katz, then Minister of Foreign Affairs and current Minister of Defense, had declared: “Not a single electrical switch will be activated, not a single tap will be opened, and not a single truck will be open. enter.” of fuel until the Israeli hostages are returned home.
The reality is that since October 7, 2023, telephone and internet services in Gaza have suffered major disruptions due to damage to communications infrastructure, power outages, fuel blockades and apparently deliberate shutdowns by the authorities. Israelis. Additionally, HRW said evacuation orders posted online were sometimes inaccurate and changed throughout the day, forcing people to constantly be online and check the information.
The Israeli military has also resorted to releasing maps with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. The general evacuation order, issued on October 13, 2023, contained one main instruction for residents of northern Gaza: head south. The air-dropped leaflets included a rudimentary map of Gaza showing where civilians should go. But then the evacuation orders became more specific. At that time, Israeli authorities “indicated the evacuation of certain neighborhoods, often with maps and arrows pointing in the direction in which they should flee. However, due to the size and scale of the shared maps, it was not always possible for the reader to know if they were in an area planned for evacuation,” HRW points out.
On December 1, 2023, the Israeli military published a map on its website, accessible via a QR code on a cell phone, that divided Gaza into a grid of 620 numbered blocks. From that point on, he continued to publish leaflets and social media posts indicating which blocks needed to be evacuated. HRW denounces, however, that nearly 31,000 people in Khan Yunis “did not receive full evacuation orders due to errors on the maps”. These included inaccuracies, such as “partial or incorrect highlighting of evacuation zones, making it difficult to know who should evacuate.” In some cases, “evacuation orders contained conflicting instructions, such as asking people to leave certain areas while simultaneously marking those same areas as safe destinations” to which they could travel.
Finally, the organization denounces that evacuation orders often lacked precise time information. Not knowing when the bombing would begin, civilians were forced to flee under extreme pressure, with no time to act. “Evacuation orders were inconsistent, inaccurate, and often not communicated to civilians in sufficient time to allow evacuations, if at all,” notes HRW.
“We didn’t know where we were going,” explains Ghazal, a 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. “This period was the most difficult I have ever gone through. These are dark memories that I don’t want to hold on to because I don’t want to keep thinking about them,” explains Ghazal, who lost his assistive devices in an attack on his home on October 11, 2023 and tried follow evacuation orders of October 13 to flee south.
“I was a burden to [mi familia]an extra burden with your belongings. I couldn’t find any means of transportation. Even able-bodied people had difficulty walking, so you can imagine what it was like for a disabled person. Ghazal says he tried to make the journey on foot for as long as possible. “At that moment, I felt that death was near. I gave up and sat on the ground in the middle of the road crying. “I told them to continue without me.”
ethnic cleansing
The displacement of Gaza’s population has also led some experts to point to possible acts of ethnic cleansing, which a UN commission defines as “a policy aimed at expelling an ethnic group from a given area through violence or threat “. HRW claims that the displacements in Gaza, motivated by the intensification of attacks and the blockade, respond to a strategy of expulsion of Palestinians from certain territories.
Without going any further, in an interview with elDiario.es, Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, assured that what is happening in the Gaza Strip is “ethnic cleansing by genocidal means.”
HRW maintains that statements by senior Israeli officials demonstrate an intention to dispossess the population of their land through massive and forced displacement. “Israel cannot justify these movements by invoking the presence of armed groups, if it does not guarantee safe areas for displaced civilians,” the report adds. These areas have been designated by the army in the south and center of Gaza, in Al Mawasi, but security will not be guaranteed there as they have been the target of repeated attacks.
The right of return and the obligation to repair
Faced with this situation, the right of return of displaced Palestinians becomes a demand for justice in the midst of a crisis. HRW highlights this right – enshrined in international law and United Nations Resolution 194 – which guarantees displaced people the possibility of returning home and recovering their property, or of receiving compensation if restitution is not possible. . “The right of return represents not only a historic demand of the Palestinians, but also a demand for recognition of the damage suffered and adequate reparation,” the report reads.
“Israel has blatantly violated its obligation to guarantee the return of Palestinians to their homes, destroying virtually everything in large areas,” denounces HRW, which in its report also includes the destruction of large areas of the Gaza Strip.
However, the organization emphasizes that Israeli authorities have offered neither conditions nor guarantees for the return of the displaced, while conditions in temporary shelters, where tens of thousands of people are overcrowded, are untenable. “We are in a plastic store; there is no water or food. And this is what Israel calls a security zone,” explains Omar, who now survives in Khan Yunis.
