Gaza: Fresh evacuation orders compound misery for enclave’s displaced

Evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military have impacted Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, forcing families to relocate “again and again, knowing that safety is non-existent in the Gaza Strip”, said the UN agency assisting Palestine refugees, UNRWA, in a post on X.

More than nine months into the war in Gaza, only 14 per cent of the enclave has not been impacted by evacuation orders, said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini. 

“Quite often, people have just a few hours to pack whatever they can and start all over again, mostly on foot or on a crowded donkey cart for those who can afford it,” he said. “Almost everyone in Gaza has been impacted by these orders. Many were forced to flee on average once a month since the war began nine months ago.”

Water plant destroyed

In a related development, the UN agency condemned the reported destruction of a water plant in Rafah in southern Gaza, a focus of Israeli military action since early May. 

“Any time, something happens - like what appears to happen in Rafah over the weekend, with a water plant destroyed - it impacts the ability we have to generate water,” said Scott Anderson, UN Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator and Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza. The UN agency has been unable to independently assess the situation, he noted. 

Uprooted – again

Echoing the testimonies of forcibly displaced people who are among those assisted by UNRWA, Mr. Anderson recounted how one woman with twins explained the chaos of the upheaval: “She said, yeah, basically, that was one child for each arm and a little backpack, you know, and off they go to try to find safety.”

According to UNRWA, evacuation orders are now issued “every other day”, while UN aid coordination office, OCHA, reported on Friday that humanitarian partners estimated that more than 190,000 Palestinians had been displaced last week in Khan Younis and Deir al Balah, since an evacuation order issued seven days ago.

Aid obstacles’ deadly result

Recent evacuation orders and intense hostilities have continued to destabilize aid operations and hampered efforts to provide critical relief to civilians in Khan Younis, OCHA insisted. 

It maintained that ongoing insecurity and the designation of “only one access point for the entry and exit of humanitarian staff into and out of Gaza – the Kerem Shalom crossing – have hampered efforts to deploy additional emergency medical teams in Gaza” – even though these workers are critically needed to help support the “exhausted” local health force.

“I met a mother and a child, a two-month-old who was starving to death and the mother didn't have sufficient nutrition to lactate and feed her baby,” Mr. Anderson said in an interview with UN News.

He explained that “when you get to severe malnutrition or acute malnutrition, you can't just give milk or food and the baby will recover. You know, for a mother to start lactation again is nearly impossible…And they look at you and say, ‘What can you do to help me?’

Learning boost bid

Latest UN data indicates that 93 per cent of schools in Gaza have been damaged and many have been directly hit. A third of the affected schools are UNRWA schools, whose approximately 14,000 teachers used to teach around 370,000 students. 

To help the hundreds of thousands of children now out of school in the enclave, UNRWA and the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, plan to provide an education boost beginning Thursday 1 August.

“We're going to try to get all the 600,000 children that should be in school back in some sort of learning environment,” Mr. Anderson said. “Hopefully this is the start of that process of rebuilding Gaza into something better than it was before 7 October and giving people, you know, the opportunity to continue to live in dignity.” 

He added: “It's incredible that people still smile, that you see them trying to get on with their lives or some entrepreneurial spirit.”