Under deadly Israeli siege, north Gaza residents face terrifying ultimatum

The Israeli army gave Lubna Nabil an ultimatum this week intended to terrify: Leave or risk death.

It was a message first in Arabic leaflets dropped onto the Jabalia refugee camp, and then barked through a quadcopter’s loudspeaker over the house-turned-displacement center where she and her five children were taking shelter with other families.

The army ordered them to leave as it intensified its offensive against what it said are regrouping Hamas forces in northern Gaza.

This is an area of conflict, she says the quadcopter warned. “Don’t think of north Gaza ever again.”

But leaving Jabalia, where Ms. Nabil was born and raised her children, is a dangerous proposition.

She and many of the estimated 400,000 Palestinians under a three-week Israeli siege in northern Gaza are weighing the risks of missile strikes and starvation against a potential outcome some say is as bad as death: being barred from returning to their home and community.

“I’m terrified that if I leave, I won’t be able to return,” Ms. Nabil says from Al Hawaja Street, where she has been living with her children, ages 1 to 13, since their shelter was struck by an Israeli missile.

But pressures are mounting.

A recent strike on her neighbor’s house wounded Ms. Nabil’s son and daughter.

A Friday ground assault by Israeli forces on Kamal Adwan hospital rounded up patients and medical staff and pushed the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza offline.

“Mass-casualty incidents”

The siege, which entered its 24th day on Friday, has prevented the United Nations and aid organizations from bringing food or medicine into large swaths of northern Gaza and has halted a polio vaccination campaign in its tracks.

The U.N. and the World Health Organization warned that unless the vaccinations resume in the north, a polio outbreak would spread in Gaza.

The siege comes amid intensified bombings in what the U.N. is describing as “mass-casualty incidents,” killing dozens of civilians. According to Gaza’s health ministry, the Israeli siege has killed more than 600 people, including 87 people in a single strike last Saturday in Beit Lahia.

In three weeks, the siege has driven 60,000 people from the north Gaza regions of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun, which border Israeli territory, pushing them further south into Gaza City, according to the U.N.

“They are doing everything to force us out of the camp,” Ms. Nabil says.

“We’ve been under fire, there’s not enough food, and the worst is the lack of water. They are pushing us to the brink, forcing us to move south.”

Yet after her brother was detained and disappeared by Israeli forces at a checkpoint as he evacuated south months ago, Ms. Nabil, like others, fears moving south.

Israel imposed the siege while battling a Hamas insurgency in northern Gaza that has not slowed despite the killing of Hamas’ top leadership, including the killing last week in southern Gaza of Yahya Sinwar. Fighters are planting explosives and launching rocket-propelled grenades at the invading Israeli army, killing a top commander on Sunday.

Yet senior diplomats, relief officials, and Palestinians worry that the Israeli campaign is imposing what has become known as the “generals’ plan” in northern Gaza. The plan, proposed by a retired general, advocated emptying the region of its population by mass forced displacement of civilians and a surrender-or-starve tactic to those who remain.

Some members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition advocate clearing northern Gaza of Palestinians to create a military buffer zone, even establish Jewish settlements in the area.

In his meeting with the prime minister in Israel Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly pressed Mr. Netanyahu over the tactic and urged him to publicly disavow the alleged plans to starve and drive out northern Gaza’s population. He declined.

Strangled aid

From Oct. 1 to Oct. 22, the Israeli military approved only four out of 73 planned U.N.-led humanitarian missions from southern to northern Gaza, while 21 requests for humanitarian dispatches to Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia were denied, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Since Oct. 1, Israel has only allowed the entry of fuel for hospitals and bakeries, the delivery of blood units to hospitals in Gaza City, and one delivery of fuel to north Gaza, the office said.

The Israeli Defense Ministry said Tuesday that 237 trucks containing humanitarian aid from Jordan and the international community had been transferred to northern Gaza over the previous eight days.

In his meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Blinken “emphasized the need for Israel to take additional steps to increase and sustain the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza and ensure that assistance reaches civilians throughout Gaza,” the State Department said.

Yet as of Friday the siege continued, and aid and food were still not entering northern Gaza, aid officials say.

Despite the dangers, and calls by Israeli politicians and media figures to depopulate northern Gaza, Ms. Nabil and others have attempted to remain, fearing that should they leave, the area will be transformed into an Israeli military zone.

The thousands who remain in Jabalia and other communities north of Gaza City believe they are the first line of defense against a wider emptying of the whole Gaza Strip.

“I’m afraid that if we leave, it will be easy for them to evacuate everyone in Gaza,” Ms. Nabil says. “First [they will drive us] from the camp, then the central Gaza Strip, and eventually all of Gaza.”

Scenes of horror

Amid the Israeli strikes on Jabalia, Gaza health officials estimate that hundreds of men, women, and children, both dead and alive, are trapped under the rubble. The U.N. says Israel is preventing emergency teams from reaching Jabalia to aid in rescue efforts.

Gaza’s civil defense agency, which carries out search and rescue operations, said it was forced to pull out of northern Gaza due to threats from Israeli forces.

Bodies litter destroyed homes and streets. Voices crying out from beneath slabs of shattered concrete and steel are fading, and ending.

After another recent strike, Ms. Nabil and her family saw the bodies of a woman and a man lying against the fence of the house they were sheltering in.

Her eldest daughter, who is 13 years old, now regularly asks, “Will I be killed?”

But for even those who decide to leave northern Gaza, the journey is just as harrowing, Palestinians say.

Families driven from Jabalia and Beit Hanoun are being forced to move through an Israeli military checkpoint cutting off northern Gaza from Gaza City.

At the checkpoint, Palestinians say, men are being separated from women and children, who are forced to huddle in an earthen crater dug by the Israeli military.

Men are stripped, blindfolded, handcuffed, searched, and detained, with multiple families saying they lost contact with male relatives who have “disappeared” from the checkpoint.

On Wednesday, Ramy Zaanin says, he was anxiously waiting for his brother, Tareq, and his brother’s wife, Renal Hammouda, to arrive in Gaza City from Beit Lahia, where they were driven out by Israeli quadcopter fire.

Yet only Renal and their children made it.

“Where is Tareq?” Mr. Zaanin asked her.

“The quadcopter told them [the men] to leave through the checkpoint,” she said. Tareq never returned.

Mr. Zaanin recalls Renal lamenting about the family’s plight. “We have lost so much,” she told her brother-in-law. “Now, death feels easier than this endless cycle of moving and displacement.”

As of Friday, Ms. Nabil says she has decided to stay in Jabalia with her children.

“We are trapped in a nightmare that never ends,” she says.