The United Nations has criticized a new order of withdrawal issued by the Israeli army in Gaza, stating that it will be a “devastating blow” in a already fragile situation.
The Israeli Army, on Sunday (20), the latest in a series of types of the type that sent hundreds of thousands of people to a smaller and smaller territory to the south.
The UN stated that, for the first time since the conflict began, it would start land operations in the area. Israel’s defense forces have already avoided land operations in areas where they believe Hamas is staying hostage.
OCHA (UN Humanitarian Coordination Office) said on Monday (21) that the order of displacement “has broken another devastating blow to the already fragile life lines that keep people alive throughout the Gaza Strip.”
The exodus of people continued on Monday, with a video of the CNN Showing hundreds of people leaving the area on foot with Israeli tanks visible to the background.
The office said the order covered an area of about 5.6 square kilometers. It is estimated that between 50 and 80,000 people were in the area at that time, many of which were already in place of travel, he said.
The newly designed withdrawal area includes medical facilities and critical water facilities, said OCHA, warning that “any damage to this infrastructure will have fatal consequences.”
With this last order, “the area of Gaza under displacement orders or within Israeli militarized areas increased to 87.8%, leaving 2.1 million civilians squeezed into a fragmented region of 12% of the track, where essential services collapsed,” added OCHA.
“This will limit the ability of the UN and our partners to move safely and effective in Gaza, making humanitarian access difficult when it is more necessary.”
The Israeli Order stated that the military plan to expand “their activities in this area, operating in areas where they have never operated before,” according to spokesman Avichay Adraee in a publication on social networks.
An NGO that operates in the area, the Palestinian MAP (Medical Assistance), said that the order puts at risk of vital humanitarian assistance and primary health and would accelerate “the systematic dismantling of”.
The MAP stated that a clinic that provided intensive care to severely malnourished people was among the affected.
Steve Cutts, an interim CEO of the MAP, said the measure cuts “the latest remaining wires of the Gaza Health and Assistance System.”
A video from Sunday CNN (20) showed hundreds of people leaving the area. One of them, Thurayya Abu Quenneis, said planes launched pamphlets ordering them to leave.
“We go out for fear of our children and ourselves; we are already fed up with what happened,” said Qunneis. “We are living on the edge; we can’t sleep, eat or drink.”
Another man, Mohammad al Najiri, told the CNN: “There are no members of Hamas, no terrorists, nothing. Why do they want us to leave?”
“We haven’t eaten anything since yesterday,” added Al Najiri. “We just want a better solution than this life.”
