Defiance in Gaza City as Israel displays BBC help sites planned for evacue

Israel has ordered the entire population of Gaza to leave, as its forces are preparing to capture north of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli air strikes continue to destroy the blocks of the towers, and the army says it now has operational control over 40% of the city, as the ground forces are preparing to fight what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the “last important fortress” of Hamas.

Netanyahu said this week that 100,000 people left the city, but up to a million people still live there – many tents or shelters. Many say they will not leave or cannot leave.

After hitting a block on the tower near his home today, Amar Sukkar urged Hamas negotiating to come and negotiate from a tent, not air-conditioned rooms in Qatar-and insisted that he would stay in the city.

“Whether you like it or not, Netanyahu, we don’t leave,” he told a trusted freelancer working for the BBC. “Go to deal with Hamas, go and kill them. We are not guilty. And even if we are buried here, we don’t leave. This is my land.”

Wael Shaban, also living near the tower, which was directed today, said they were given 15 minutes to escape before the strike.

“When we came back, the tents, the flour, everything is gone. Nothing is left. It’s all that we press us south, but we don’t have the money to go. We can’t even afford to eat.

The Israeli army tells the residents of Gaza that there is a lot of shelter, food and water in the so -called humanitarian zones to the south.

But help organizations say that the areas they are sent to are already highly overcrowded and have no food and medical resources. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that nowhere in Gaza can currently be so absorbed by people, describing the mass evacuation plan as “inconspicuous” and “incomprehensible”.

Currently, the Israeli army is building a new site to distribute aid near Rafa, 30 km (18 miles) to the south. It says he also provides thousands of additional tents and puts a new water supply from Egypt.

The BBC travels to the area as part of a military embedded to see the new site. This is the first time the BBC has been allowed to enter the gas since December 2023.

The military builts are offered at the discretion of Israel, are highly controlled and do not offer access to Palestinians or areas that are not under Israeli military control – but at the moment they are the only way BBC journalists to go into gas at all.

Israel does not allow news organizations, including the BBC, in Gaza to report independently.

Rafa is a reminder of what happened last time when Israel’s Prime Minister sent his strength to city to crush Hamas’s “last fortress”.

During the just -paved military road along the border of Gaza with Egypt, we cross the destroyed remains of the old border crossing of Rafa, the roof of a building cracks and fades on the ground.

Further on the road known as the corridor Philadelphi, discrete piles of masonry and split metals, mapped where every house or farm building once stood.

The city of Rafa, close to the place of the new aid, is almost not leveled in the desert. However, even silent, his life wiped; Only a few marked pockets with pockets are lowered from the sea of ​​ruins scattered for miles through the sand.

It was easy to notice the new earth mounds and concrete explosive blocks rising from the landscape filled with ruins beyond it, near Tel El-Sultan.

In short driving from the main point of intersection of Kerem Shalom, the angle of the Al Mavasi Humanitarian Zone, where many displaced people shelter, is just visible up the shore.

“The whole idea is a safe, fast route,” said a spokesman for Israeli military, Lieutenant Nadav Shoshany. “The shortest distance for the trucks and for the people who enter. We can guarantee 0% robbery.”

Two separate areas were shown to us, each of about 100 m (328 feet), where the Israeli forces stated that unloading and distribution could be carried out in a continuous cycle.

Inside a perimeter wall, two American trucks were already parked on the sand.

Israel says that new resource places will be handed over to Israel -backed Humanitarian Gaza Foundation (GHF) in the coming days, and security here – as on other GHF sites – will be provided by private US security forces, with Israeli troops providing the area around.

But the UN says more than 1,100 people have been killed, trying to access GHF websites since they started working in May.

LT Col Shoshani said many lessons were learned in how the sites were created.

“You can see the sand strips, the concrete walls, make it very clear where to go and make sure that people do not approach troops and get involved in a dangerous situation,” he said. “The important thing (is also important how close they are -just a very short distance to where people are. It makes it easier, but also more fucked.”

But some of those who are now told that they are leaving the city of Gaza, they say that it will not be more fierce elsewhere after repeated Israeli strikes on goals in shelters, tents and certain humanitarian areas.

“This is Hamas’s MoD (mode of work),” said Lieutenant Colonel Shoshany. “He says: No, don’t go, you’re our shields! Don’t move south!”

“A year ago, we performed a similar operation (in Rafa) that was successful,” he said. “The civilians managed to get out of the fire line, maximum terrorists of Hamas dead, we want to achieve it in Gaza.”

Rafa residents were evacuated before the ground operation there in May 2024 – “temporarily” the army – said – in the displacement areas created along the coast. The area they left behind is still under full military control.

But the evacuation of Gaza – and the fight against Hamas in its tunnels and streets – will be a more difficult and more dangerous task.

Hamas fighters are increasingly turning to the tactics of the uprising and the guerrilla attacks. Earlier this week, four Israeli soldiers were killed in an attack on the outskirts of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israel’s leaders are under intense pressure at home from the posterities of hostages, who say plans to accept the city are a death sentence for living relatives holding there.

Benjamin Netanyahu – unwavering criticism at home – before that he boasted his determination in watching an international opposition and going forward with his offensive in Rafa.

Now, with prospects for a transaction to end the fire, and up to a million exhausted Gazani in the line of fire, he tells his critics that another offensive stands between him and the victory over Hamas.

Additional reporting from Morgan Gisholt Minard and Dave Bull