Sides battle as civilians flee
DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA STRIP >> Crowds of Palestinian families stretching as far as the eye could see walked out of Gaza City and surrounding areas toward the south Thursday to escape Israeli airstrikes and ground troops battling Hamas in dense urban neighborhoods. Others joined tens of thousands taking shelter at the city's biggest hospital, not far from the fighting.
Gaza's largest city is the focus of Israel's campaign to crush Hamas following its deadly Oct. 7 incursion — and the Israeli military says Hamas' main command center is in and under the Shifa Hospital complex. The group and hospital staff deny that claim, saying the military is creating a pretext to strike it.
Growing numbers of people have been living in and around the hospital complex, hoping it will be safer than their homes or U.N. shelters in the north, several of which have been hit repeatedly. Israeli troops were around 2 miles from the hospital, according to its director.
The accelerating exodus to the south came as Israel agreed to hold four-hour daily humanitarian pauses and to open a second route for people to flee the north, the White House said. The scope of the pauses was not immediately clear. The agreement came as Western and Arab officials gathered in Paris on Thursday to discuss ways of providing more aid to civilians in Gaza.
Separately, mediators worked on a possible deal for a three-day cease-fire in exchange for the release of around a dozen hostages held by Hamas, according to two Egyptian officials, a United Nations official and a Western diplomat.
Israeli ground forces battled near Gaza's largest hospital, Shifa. Conditions for tens of thousands of people sheltering there have become “catastrophic,” said Wafaa Abu Hajajj, a Palestinian journalist at the hospital.
She, as well as several people who left the hospital to go south, said families are sleeping in hospital rooms, emergency rooms, surgical theaters and the maternity ward, or on the streets outside. Daily food distributions helped a tiny number for a time, but there has been no bread for the past four days, they said. Water is scarce and usually polluted, and few people can bathe.
Still more families are arriving, believing it is safer than fleeing to the south, where airstrikes also continue — although some have started to leave because of nearby missile strikes and the sound of clashes between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters, Abu Hajajj said.
The hospital has been overwhelmed with daily waves of wounded from airstrikes, while medical supplies have been running low and electricity shut off in many wards. The U.N. delivered two truckloads of supplies Wednesday night, the second delivery since the war began — enough to last a few hours, the director said.
“The conditions here are disastrous in every sense of the word,” director Mohammed Abu Selmia told The Associated Press on Thursday. “We're short on medicine and equipment, and the doctors and nurses are exhausted. … We're unable to do much for the patients.”
International journalists who entered the north on a tour led by the Israeli military Wednesday saw heavily damaged buildings, fields of rubble and toppled trees along the Mediterranean shoreline.
More than two-thirds of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have fled their homes since the war began, with hundreds of thousands heeding Israeli orders to flee to the southern part of the enclave.
But the conditions there are also dire. Israel has continued to strike what it says are militant targets in the south, but often crushing homes with families inside.
Aid deliveries into Gaza from Egypt have reached an average of 100 trucks a day, the U.S. humanitarian envoy for the war David Satterfield said Thursday. Relief workers say that is still far below what is needed.
The exodus from Gaza City and surrounding areas in the north has picked up in recent days. The U.N. said 50,000 people fled south on Gaza's main highway Wednesday.
Similar-sized crowds streamed out Thursday, according to an Associated Press reporter on the scene as they arrived out of the northern zone. Shots rang out in the distance and smoke rose from blocks away as families made their way on foot with only what they could carry. Others rode on horse-drawn carts.
“I'm carrying my house on my back,” said Kamal Nsew, 28, pointing to the possessions tied to his body. He had been walking three hours, he said. “We've been expelled, we've been put through a catastrophe. I don't know where my people are and don't know what is coming for us.”
The Hamas-run Interior Ministry, which has urged Palestinians to stay in their homes, has told news outlets not to circulate footage of people fleeing.