(Reuters) – Mosques called on residents of the Gaza Strip not to leave their homes on Friday after Israel’s military told all civilians, more than 1 million people, to relocate south ahead of an expected ground invasion that risks high casualties.
Any incursion could be pivotal in fighting between the Israeli military and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which on Saturday launched the bloodiest attack on the country since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
Israel has already launched the heaviest air strikes on Gaza ever and has mobilised 300,000 reservists and amassed tanks near the border.
The threats of a ground invasion have conjured up images of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe that refers to the 1948 war of Israel’s creation that led to their mass dispossession.
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Gaza analyst Talal Okal described the Israeli relocation order as an “attempt to push the Palestinian people of Gaza into Nakba”.
“Like they did in 1948 when they pushed people out of historical Palestine by dropping barrels of explosives on their heads, today Israel is repeating this before the eyes of the world and live cameras,” Okal told Reuters.
Hamas militants killed more than 1,300 Israelis in its attack on Saturday. Israeli air strikes in response have killed more than 1,400 people in Gaza so far, authorities there said.
As a ground invasion appears imminent, Israel is telling Gaza civilians to leave, and Hamas is telling them to stay put.
“Civilians of Gaza City, evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families and distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields,” the military said.
“Hamas terrorists are hiding in Gaza City inside tunnels underneath houses and inside buildings populated with innocent Gazan civilians.”
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Well-known Gaza Hamas cleric Wael Al-Zard was killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza, Hamas said. His son was killed a few weeks ago during border protests along the fence.
“Ordering a million people in Gaza to evacuate, when there’s no safe place to go, is not an effective warning. The roads are rubble, fuel is scarce, and the main hospital is in the evacuation zone,” said Clive Baldwin, senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch.
“This order does not alter Israel’s obligations in military operations to never target civilians and take all the measures it can to minimize harm to them. World leaders should speak up now before it is too late.”
Inside Shifa hospital, the largest of Gaza’s 13 public hospitals, a man arrived to check on dozens of relatives and friends who had been brought from the site of a residential building Israel bombed in Beach refugee camp.
“I survived, I don’t know why I survived. It is so that I tell the enemy, America, Europe and the world that this Palestinian people will not be defeated,” the man cried toward reporters.
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“They think there will be another displacement, or that we may go to Egypt. Nonsense,” he said before going into the morgue to try and identify dead relatives.
Eyad Al-Bozom, spokesman for the Hamas Interior Ministry, urged Arabs everywhere especially in countries that have borders with Israel to support the people of Gaza.
“We tell the people of northern Gaza and from Gaza City, stay put in your homes, and your places. By carrying out massacres against the civilians, the occupation wants to displace us once again from our land,” he said.
“The 1948 displacement will not happen. We will die and we will not leave,” Bozom said at a news conference held at Shifa hospital in Gaza City.