News / Palestine

UNRWA says 84% of Gazans under Israeli evacuation order

Tuesday, 13 August 2024 4:23 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 13 August 2024 5:09 PM ]

Palestinians attend the funeral of people killed in an Israeli strike, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on August 12, 2024. (AFP)

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which is the main humanitarian agency in Gaza, says more than 80 percent of the population has been forcibly displaced due to the Israeli offensive across the besieged Palestinian territory.

In a post on Tuesday, UNRWA announced that 84 percent of the population in Gaza is under evacuation order by the Israeli military.

"They are exhausted and have nowhere safe to go," the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East said

Displacement never ends in #Gaza. Nearly 84% of the Gaza Strip - about 305 km² - has been placed under evacuation orders by the Israeli military

People run for their lives, grabbing what they can and leaving everything else behind. They are exhausted and have nowhere safe to go. pic.twitter.com/ojt2yzoFL2
— UNRWA (@UNRWA) August 13, 2024

Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a press conference that “two evacuation orders were issued by the Israeli military over the weekend for Khan Yunis, mostly for areas that were previously placed under evacuation,”

The Israeli military issued two evacuation orders on August 10 and 11.

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the orders affected around 23 displacement sites, 14 water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities and four educational facilities across Gaza.

According to some of the displaced Palestinians, an area that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone and has ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to go to, has become an overcrowded “hell”.

“Our life in these camps is like hell.”

The food and water are scarce and safety is not guaranteed in the so-called 'safe zone'.

“The truth is that this area is anything but humanitarian,” said Kamel Mohammed, a 36-year-old sheltering in a tent with nine family members, according to The New York Times.

Mohammed described the humanitarian zone, a once-vacant strip of coastal land known as Mawasi, as a “barren sand desert” crammed with displaced families that offers “no sense of safety.”

The Israeli military has issued a string of evacuation orders in recent weeks, uprooting tens of thousands of people in various parts of the Gaza Strip, and many of them have moved into the Mawasi zone.

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