Gaza is bracing for invasion after 1.2 million civilians were told to flee for their lives.
Israeli military drones dropped flyers throughout the day yesterday demanding that Palestinians evacuate the northern half of the strip ‘within 24 hours’ or risk being caught in a military escalation.
The IDF then launched its first ‘localised’ raids into Gaza, deploying columns of Merkava main battle tanks alongside infantry into the tired enclave in search of hostages taken in the surprise attack by Hamas a week ago.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country would ‘never forget this atrocity’ and warned ‘this is just the beginning’.
‘We will end this war stronger than ever. We will destroy Hamas,’ he said.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant added his defence forces would take Hamas ‘out of Gaza and out of the Earth’ and ‘effect permanent change’ in the territory.
In a statement, the IDF said it would ‘operate significantly’ within Gaza City ‘in the coming days’, telling Palestinians: ‘You will only be able to return to Gaza when another announcement permitting it is made.’
Israel was accused of breaking international law over the sudden order to leave, with aid agencies warning such an unprecedented evacuation was impossible. The United Nations urged Israel to withdraw the demand and said it would have ‘devastating humanitarian consequences’.
World leaders came together to condemn Israel’s hurried evacuation of a civilian population reeling from a week of near-constant bombardment.
US President Joe Biden – who has remained staunchly supportive of Israel – urged Israel not to ‘lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas and Hamas’ appalling attacks’. Russia – seldom in agreement – compared Israel’s siege of Gaza to the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
A column of Merkava main battle tanks deployed along the border with Gaza on October 13
Israeli Merkava battle tanks deploy along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on October 13, 2023, as battles continue for the seventh consecutive day
Israeli forces are amassing on the border with Gaza ahead of an expected ground invasion
Smoke billows over Gaza City on October 13, a bleak scene as Palestinians try to flee an anticipated ground invasion by Israeli forces
More than 300 children have been killed and 300,000 displaced since Israel launched sustained retaliatory air attacks on Gaza
Palestinians grabbed bags and desperately tried to save the lives of their loved ones, leaving their homes behind as Israeli main battle tanks crossed into Gaza, on October 13, 2023
Riding a donkey drawn cart as family along with hundreds of other Palestinian carrying their belongings flee following the Israeli army’s warning to leave their homes and move south
Cars made a desperate exodus south ahead of an anticipated Israeli invasion
A Palestinian girl among the cars fleeing Gaza ahead of an expected ground invasion
Hamas, meanwhile, accused Israel of ‘psychological warfare’ and urged Palestinians not to flee. They told residents to ‘remain steadfast in your homes and to stand firm in the face of this disgusting psychological war waged by the occupation’.
But an exodus was already under way following a week of air strikes and blockades in retaliation for last Saturday’s Hamas raids that left more than 1,300 dead.
Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with blankets and possessions streamed down a main road out of Gaza City. On day seven of the war:
- The UN’s refugee agency warned that Gaza faced a ‘bone-chilling’ humanitarian crisis;
- Iran told Israel ‘new fronts’ would open up if it continued ‘war crimes’ in Gaza;
- Hamas claimed 13 hostages were killed in Israeli air strikes, including foreign nationals – a claim denied by Israel;
- Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said it was ‘very likely’ British nationals were among the hostages;
- The death toll in Gaza rose to 1,900 since Israel’s retaliatory strikes began;
- Israel released further harrowing images of atrocities committed during the Hamas raids;
- In Britain, some Jewish schools closed their doors amid fear of attacks following a Hamas call for protests;
- Prime Minister Rishi Sunak condemned a ‘disgusting’ rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the UK as 1,000 extra police readied themselves for a London demonstration today;
- Britain was accused of botching repatriation flights for its nationals.
Flyers dropped by the IDF warning residents to flee are seen in the skies above Gaza today
Palestinians make the perilous journey south from the southern Gaza Strip, October 13, 2023
Some 1.2mn were ordered to evacuate parts of Gaza – around half the total population
Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with blankets and possessions streamed down a main road out of Gaza City
Palestinians fleeing from northern Gaza to the south after Israel issued an unprecedented evacuation warning to a population of over 1mn people in northern Gaza and Gaza City
Some 300,000 people had already been displaced by the war – within fewer than seven days
Israel said its defence forces would ‘operate significantly in Gaza City’ in the coming days, suggesting a ground assault was imminent. It said it would take ‘extensive efforts’ to avoid harm to civilians, but that Hamas terrorists were hiding in tunnels underneath houses and civilian infrastructure and would use anyone who remained as human shields.
It demanded the evacuation of a vast swathe of northern Gaza, including the Hamas stronghold of Gaza City. Civilians were ordered to flee to the south of the 25-mile long territory – effectively forcing the entire two million population into an area half the size of the Isle of Wight.
As night fell, Hamas claimed 70 people, including women and children, had been killed in Israeli air strikes on those fleeing the de facto capital.
Before his wife Akshata Murty lit a candle in the window of Downing Street, Mr Sunak said Israel had ‘every right to defend itself’, but stressed that civilian safety must be ‘paramount in our minds’, joining a host of Western leaders who have urged caution as things threaten to spiral out of control.
Speaking to the media after talks with allies in Sweden, Mr Sunak highlighted how he had urged his Israeli counterpart during a conversation late on Thursday that any action needed to ‘protect civilians’ caught in the crossfire.
Yesterday there were clashes and panic across the region ahead of the possible full-scale offensive.
In the West Bank, 11 people were killed in uprisings on a ‘day of rage’ called by Hamas leaders. Residents in scores of Israeli towns and cities were repeatedly ordered into bunkers as the terrorists blasted rockets across the border.
In the north of the country, Iran-backed Hezbollah sent missiles into the Israeli border town of Hanita, forcing Israel to respond by firing into Lebanon.
Senior EU officials and Israeli president Isaac Herzog were forced to seek cover in protected shelters as air-raid sirens sounded across Tel Aviv.
Incredibly, amid a massive security operation, suspected Hamas terrorists are still being found in Israel. Sky News, reporting from the site of the Nova festival atrocity, saw a knife-wielding man it believed was a Hamas fighter who has been hiding since Saturday. He was stripped, blindfolded and handcuffed.
Gaza continues to endure devastating strikes from above – on October 13, 2023
Smoke rises above buildings, in the southern Gaza Strip, following an Israeli strike, on Friday October 13, 2023
Palestinians with their belongings flee to safer areas in Gaza City after Israeli air strikes, on October 13, 2023
A Palestinian man runs amid the rubble of a building hit in an Israeli air strike on October 13
A child carrying an infants car seat evacuates Gaza City following an Israeli warning of increased military operations in the Gaza strip, 13 October 2023
As civilians in Gaza gather what possessions they can, international onlookers have urged Israel to reconsider, judging the 24-hour notice ‘impossible’ to work around.
Both the United Nations and the World Health Organisation have urgently called on Israel to revoke the evacuation order, saying it will result in a humanitarian disaster whether people can flee or not.
With power supplies cut and food and water in the Palestinian enclave depleted, time is running out for Gaza’s civilian population – who now also face cuts to humanitarian aid from abroad.
‘The noose around the civilian population in Gaza is tightening. How are 1.1 million people supposed to move across a densely populated warzone in less than 24 hours?’ U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths wrote on social media.
A statement from the World Health Organisation said: ‘WHO joins the wider United Nations in appealing to Israel to immediately rescind orders for the evacuation of over 1 million people living north of Wadi Gaza.
‘A mass evacuation would be disastrous—for patients, health workers and other civilians left behind or caught in the mass movement.’
More than 80 per cent of Gaza’s population rely on humanitarian aid – which the EU said it would ‘review’ earlier this week – and most lack access to a vehicle.
The desperate exodus south has not guaranteed the safe passage of Gazans out of the firing line. Hamas’ media office said today that 70 people, mostly women and children, were killed in the air raids on cars leaving Gaza City.
Médecins Sans Frontières said on Friday evening that Israel had given Al Awda Hospital in Gaza ‘just two hours to evacuate’, causing panic in one of the most vulnerable spaces.
‘Our staff are still treating patients,’ the group wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
‘We unequivocally condemn this action, the continued indiscriminate bloodshed and attacks on health care in Gaza. We are trying to protect our staff and patients.’
The group, named Doctors Without Borders in English, is a charity that provides humanitarian medical care.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Gazans had ‘nowhere safe to go’ and it was ‘impossible’ for them to know which areas ‘will next face attack’.
With a military siege in place, humanitarian organisations ‘will not be able to assist such a massive displacement of people in Gaza’.
Life saving machines running on generators are soon expected to stop working across the strip as doctors work around the clock to save the lives of men, women and children swept into the conflict.
Ashraf Al Qidra, spokesperson of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, explained that Israel’s decision to blockade Gaza under ‘total siege’ was pushing ‘our medical operation into a precarious situation’.
He said that without quick action to restore power, hospitals faced ‘huge loss of these lives’.
US President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly given staunch support for Israel, said that addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was a ‘priority’.
‘We can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas and Hamas’s appalling attacks, and they’re suffering as a result as well,’ Biden said during a speech in Philadelphia.
Earlier the White House said the evacuation demand was a ‘tall order’.
Even Saudi Arabia broke its silence on Friday to urge Israel to relent, denouncing the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and attacks on ‘defenceless civilians’ – its strongest language criticising Israel since the war broke out.
Riyadh ‘affirms its categorical rejection of calls for the forced displacement of the Palestinian people from Gaza, and its condemnation of the continued targeting of defenceless civilians there,’ the foreign ministry said in a statement.
The comments come in spite of attempts – mediated by US President Joe Biden – to facilitate normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a move unfavourable to Hamas.
The United Nations said it had been informed of the order shortly before midnight but as thousands of people streamed southwards in cars and on foot, the Israeli army admitted that the evacuation would ‘take time’.
Two-month-old Muhammad Al-Khayyat baby dies in the hospital despite all the efforts as a result of the Israeli attacks in Rafah, Gaza on October 13, 2023
Medics in Gaza say time is running out for a population on life support as generators struggle to keep the power on for essential machines. Pictured: doctors examine a child at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis
Gaza has been reduced largely to rubble, with tens of thousands of residential buildings destroyed
Gaza City (pictured) and the rest of the north has been urged to try to move south – which onlookers say will be ‘impossible’ and result in ‘humanitarian catastrophe’
The Saudi statement was published as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Riyadh as part of a six-nation tour of Arab countries.
US officials have appeared to backtrack on earlier efforts to let Gazans flee to neighbouring Egypt, saying they did not see wide support, and have instead promoted the idea of ‘safe areas’ within Gaza.
Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby also appealed on Friday for the creation of a humanitarian corridor and convoy in Gaza where, he said, more than two million civilians, half of them children, were facing a catastrophe.
‘But in the face of a ground offensive in Gaza, I plead that the sins of Hamas are not borne by the citizens of Gaza, who themselves have faced such suffering over many decades.
‘The price of evil cannot be paid by the innocent. Civilians cannot bear the costs of terrorists,’ he said in a statement.