Desperate scenes along coastal road leading south from Gaza City
This is Gaza’s coastal road, which is seen at the moment as a lifeline for families fleeing Gaza City under threat of bombardment. We can see thousands of cars, trucks, and donkey carts loaded with furniture and personal belongings, as people move south to try to find a place of refuge.
Some cars have broken down or run out of fuel. You sometimes see cars towing another vehicle, or being pushed by hand. This is a desperate journey and scenes like this have been happening for more than a week. We have seen families sleeping by the side of the road.
For them, moving south does not mean they’ll be completely safe. But they’re trying to get away from areas of bombardment towards areas that have been designated so-called humanitarian spaces, despite the absence of any humanitarian infrastructure.
Displaced Palestinians flee southward in the central Gaza Strip after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate
Israeli army orders forced evacuation of Gaza City school sheltering displaced Palestinians
The Israeli army has issued a new forced evacuation order for a school in Gaza City, which shelters hundreds of displaced Palestinians who fled their homes in the eastern parts of the city. Many are wondering what might come next.
“The situation is getting much more dire as these people don’t have anywhere to run, and the high cost of relocating and heading to the south is very high and unaffordable for hundreds of displaced Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili. “The situation is getting much more dire and chaotic in the light of these first evacuation orders”.
“They told us we had six to seven hours to evacuate the school quickly,” Najwa Musabeh, a displaced woman, told Al Jazeera.
“We’ve been living like this for two years. We have no money to keep moving. We left our belongings behind, and even my children. I don’t know where they are or where they went. We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re not leaving Gaza. We have nowhere else to go”.
‘The horror of it all’: Doctor describes ‘catastrophic’ conditions at Gaza City hospital
An Australian anaesthesiologist working at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital has described the horrors of working amid Israel’s offensive on the territory’s largest urban centre.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from the hospital, where she had been based for less than a week, Dr Saya Aziz said the situation was “catastrophic”. “I don’t think anyone has anything quite like it,” she said.
“You’ll hear a big huge bomb, then you’ll know within 5-10 minutes, you’re going to get a mass casualty. You’ll hear the wailing, the screams, the chaos … family members bringing in the patients.”
She described the scenes that confronted medical staff following an attack as “a bloodbath … You’ll walk into the resus area and … don’t know where to look,” she said. “Bits of flesh everywhere, dangling bits of toes, muscle, tendons … The horror of it all.”
“The [staff] who have turned up are essentially risking their lives to come,” she said. She said one anaesthetic assistant had walked four hours from southern Gaza to show up for work. “He worked a 24-hour shift, kept going all night, with a foot that he’d hurt because he was digging his tent for his family and children that he’d left in the south,” she said.
“He couldn’t bring it upon himself to not come back to work because he said if it wasn’t him, who is going to turn up for these patients? Every soul to them matters.”
