Displacement has affected the majority of Palestinians in Gaza living through the year-long war between Israel and Hamas. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international non-governmental organization, set the number of internally displaced people (IDP) at 1.9 million in the Gaza Strip.
Among those displaced, recent photos posted by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on X, formerly Twitter, show hundreds of civilians lined up together, holding their meagre belongings and filing out of the Jabalia refugee camp based on instructions from the IDF.
“We gathered from 10 a.m. and then everyone left. There were injured people,” Youssef Zaid told CBC freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife. “People were terrified. It was very scary.” Zaid said he was among the people forced out of Jabalia who were shown in one of the IDF photos.
For the past year, Palestinians in Gaza have been on the move, from north to south, under instructions from the IDF. Many of the close to two million IDPs in Gaza estimated by international organizations, including the United Nations, hope they will be able to return home, but as the war rages on, that hope diminishes.
Sitting in his uncle’s home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, Zaid said that on Oct. 21, he and his family, along with hundreds of other civilians, were instructed to make their way to the centre of Jabalia and prepare for evacuation. The message was sent through leaflets and drones outfitted with microphones.
Zaid and his wife and six children had been sheltering at a school, but as fighting ramped up in the north, they were asked to move again and go south.
“I swear we were scared … we didn’t know what would happen,” he said.
At this point, he said, the civilians were surrounded from every side with tanks and possibly snipers. Everyone was asked to hold up their Palestinian ID, the white piece of paper in their hands, look forward and keep walking.
“The men are scared to speak or talk about anything, the whole situation was scary,” Zaid said.
Over the next five hours, the men were separated from the women and children, made to stand in line with the rest of the group and file out five by five through a checkpoint, where IDF soldiers searched them and their belongings.
Holding up the photo on his phone, Zaid said that moment was the “hardest situation” in the whole evacuation because he was apart from his family.
In a statement to CBC News, the IDF said such evacuations are carried out “to protect the uninvolved population.”
While the Israeli military calls for the evacuation of civilians from combat zones, it said the army will not refrain from operating in the area “if it identifies terrorist organization activities threatening the security of Israel.”
The IDF said that any persons suspected of terrorist activities “are detained and interrogated.” Those found not to be involved in suspicious activities are released. “In some cases, detainees are required to remove clothing to check for concealed explosives or other weapons,” the statement said. Following the search, their clothes are returned.
Ivana Hajzmanova, global monitoring manager at the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center in Switzerland, said although it’s difficult to quantify, the centre estimates that Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced at least “10 times” in the last year.
“The human toll of this war is extremely high,” she said. “For some, displacement has been a requirement in Palestine for decades now — grandparents, parents, children being constantly displaced by conflict and violence in the territory.”
Hajzmanova said even after they’ve left their hometowns, Palestinians are faced with another issue: finding a safe place to shelter. Most civilians are currently in “less than 20 per cent of the space in Gaza,” she said. “Most of the territory has been put under relocation directives.”
Rehab Khalil, 45, was also among the hundreds of people in the IDF photo. She said she left with her nine children after her husband struggled to find options for dialysis and died earlier in the war.
“We felt fear,” she said. “My children were falling on the ground from fear.”
Khalil said she didn’t have time to take anything with her other than a small bag of belongings. Now in central Gaza, she said she doesn’t know where to go, but she still holds out hope that one day she will return home.
“And God willing, we will go home. What happened to us is not fair,” she said.
