Gaza City : Watching the pulverized alleys of Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza empty of people, Naji Jamal was frozen with indecision. Should he heed the Israeli army's demand that all Palestinians evacuate and make the risky trip to Gaza's south, where his only certainty was homelessness? Or should he stay at his multistory building within what the Israeli army has now designated a target zone ahead of a likely Israeli ground invasion?
"It's an existential question, but there is no answer," Jamal, a 34-year-old health clinic worker, said. "There is no safe haven, there is no place that is not being shelled and besieged, there is no place to go." In an unprecedented order to civilians in northern Gaza and Gaza City, the Israeli military gave Jamal and 1.1 million other Palestinians 24 hours to make up their minds. It was the sixth day of Israeli bombing prompted by Hamas' brutal attack that killed more than 1,300 Israelis and stunned the country.
As the clock ticked on the ultimatum, hundreds of thousands of Israeli army reservists were massing near Gaza's northern border. Israeli warplanes roared overhead, diving low to hurl bombs at homes and residential high-rises. Aid groups appealed to the international community to stop what they denounced as a possible war crime of forcible population transfer.
In understaffed and poorly supplied hospitals, Palestinian doctors said they felt they had no choice but to stay put. There was no way to evacuate Shifa, Gaza's biggest hospital, its general director Mohammad Abu Selim said. Even though the hospital was in chaos its electricity dwindling under an Israeli siege, its beds overwhelmed, its morgue overflowing Abu Selim said there was simply no other safe place in Gaza to put 600 patients, many of them in serious condition from the attacks. "To ask us to evacuate is ridiculous, it's impossible," Abu Selim said.
But hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians across the territory wrangled over the agonizing choice as the Israeli retaliation intensified. The Israeli army says its airstrikes target militant infrastructure, not civilians a claim that Palestinians reject. Many fled south for their lives, squeezing into relatives' cars and trundling through streets blocked by rubble even as thundering bombardment crashed around them. A jumbled line of tractors, horse carts and donkeys stretched some 30 kilometers across the strip, turning what is normally a breezy 45-minute trip into a harrowing and for dozens of people, deadly two-hour journey. Israeli airstrikes on evacuating vehicles killed at least 70 people, the Hamas press office said.
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