{"id":153160,"date":"2025-09-18T18:24:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T18:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/153160\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T18:24:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T18:24:08","slug":"more-than-250000-displaced-from-gaza-city-in-past-month-un-figures-show-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/153160\/","title":{"rendered":"More than 250,000 displaced from Gaza City in past month, UN figures show | Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced from Gaza City<\/a> in the last month, according to figures from the UN, with tens of thousands more forced to flee makeshift homes and shelters daily in the face of a new Israeli offensive.<\/p>\n

Multiple strikes by Israeli artillery, tanks and warplanes hit Gaza City again on Thursday as a UN official said \u201cnew waves of mass displacement\u201d were under way, after about 60,000 fled the new assault in 72 hours earlier this week.<\/p>\n

Israeli military officials say the total number following Israeli orders to evacuate Gaza<\/a> City is much higher.<\/p>\n

An unbroken column of traffic heavily laden with household utensils, blankets, mattresses, gas cylinders and often entire families packed Gaza\u2019s narrow coastal road on Thursday as a steady stream of Palestinians headed south towards areas designated by Israel.<\/p>\n

Satellite image of people travelling south from Gaza City <\/a>Satellite image of people travelling south from Gaza City <\/p>\n

Prices for transport have soared, forcing some to walk, laden with belongings and young children. \u201cWe are heading to go sleep on the streets towards the beach, like this, barefoot \u2026 We don\u2019t know where to go,\u201d said Yasser Saleh, speaking as he stood on a rickety trailer being pulled by a car.<\/p>\n

Israeli military officials said Gaza City was a \u201cHamas stronghold\u201d and said as many as 450,000 civilians had left. The estimate was based on multiple sources, including drone surveillance, an official told the Guardian.<\/p>\n

Israeli forces now control Gaza City\u2019s eastern suburbs and in recent days have moved into the Sheikh Radwan <\/a>and Tel al-Hawa areas, from where they would be positioned to advance on the central and western districts where most of the remaining population is sheltering.<\/p>\n

Swathes of Gaza City, once a busy commercial and cultural hub, have been reduced to uninhabitable ruins. Until weeks ago, more than a million people were living there, many already displaced multiple times.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday Bezalel Smotrich, Israel\u2019s far-right finance minister, described Gaza<\/a> as a \u201creal-estate bonanza\u201d, according to local Hebrew media reports. Speaking to a property development conference in Tel Aviv, Smotrich said \u201cthe demolition, the first stage in [Gaza City\u2019s] renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.\u201d<\/p>\n

satellite map<\/a><\/p>\n

The same day, the Israeli military announced the opening of a second route out of Gaza City \u2013 through the middle of the Gaza Strip \u2013 for two days to try to encourage the exodus. Its Arabic-language spokesperson, Col Avichay Adraee, said the corridor would remain open for just 48 hours.<\/p>\n

Shadi Jawad, 47, who fled Gaza City via the route, said: \u201cThe situation is indescribable \u2013 crowds everywhere, the sound of explosions, women and men crying and screaming as they walked while carrying their belongings.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Israel military has been dropping leaflets urging residents to flee towards a designated \u201chumanitarian zone\u201d in the south of the territory, but aid agencies say conditions there are dire, with insufficient food, medicine and space and inadequate shelter.<\/p>\n

Rosalia Bollen of Unicef said: \u201cThe area in southern Gaza that people are ordered to go to is a largely overcrowded stretch of dunes. It is inappropriate, unprepared and unsafe to host displaced families with immense humanitarian needs there. And for the hundreds of thousands of people still left in Gaza City \u2013 half of them children \u2013 we are deeply worried, as airstrikes have been pounding Gaza City.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of northern Gaza is gripped by famine, according to internationally respected experts.<\/p>\n

Hamas\u2019s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, warned the Israeli military to expect fierce fighting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are ready to send the lives of your soldiers to hell, and we have prepared for you an army of martyrs,\u201d the group said in a statement.<\/p>\n

Late on Thursday the Israeli military said four of its soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in Rafah in southern Gaza. Elsewhere, debris from the interception of an explosive drone fired from Yemen struck the port city of Eilat, in the far south of Israel, and an attacker killed two men at the main border crossing between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel\u2019s prime minister, rejected the advice of Israel\u2019s most senior generals and intelligence officials not to launch the new offensive. Many Israeli observers and commentators accuse Netanyahu, who is facing corruption charges and is wanted for war crimes by the international criminal court<\/a>, of seeking to fend off early elections, which could force his hard-right coalition from power, by prolonging the war.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, a UN commission of inquiry accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip<\/a>, saying Netanyahu and other senior officials had incited the crime. Israel rejected the findings as \u201cdistorted and false\u201d.<\/p>\n

At least 79 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes or gunfire across Gaza in the past 24 hours, mostly in Gaza City, the territory\u2019s health ministry said on Thursday.<\/p>\n

The war was triggered by an attack by Hamas into Israel in October 2023 in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Of the 251 people taken hostage, 47 remain in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 65,000 people, also mostly civilians, and injured more than 160,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced from Gaza City in the last month,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-153160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}