Nine in 10 people in Gaza displaced at least once since war began, says UN agency

About 90 per cent of the population of Gaza has been displaced at least once since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, according to a UN humanitarian agency.

About 1.9 million people are believed to be displaced in Gaza, Andrea De Domenico, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Palestinian territories, said.

“We estimate that nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not up to 10 times, unfortunately, since October,” he told reporters, according to AFP.

“Before we were estimating 1.7 (million) but since that number, we had the operation in Rafah, and we had additional displacement from Rafah,” he said.

“Then we also had operations in the north that [have] also moved people,” he added.

Israel launched a brutal ground and air war on Gaza after Hamas attacked southern Israel and killed nearly 1,200 people on 7 October last year.

The Israeli war has killed around 38,000 Palestinians so far, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Mr De Domenico said: “Behind these numbers, there are people … that have fears and grievances. And they had probably dreams and hopes; the less and less, I fear today, unfortunately.

“People who in the last nine months have been moved around like pawns in a board game.”

Gaza is “the only place in the world where people cannot find a safe refuge, and can’t leave the front line”, he said, according to Al Jazeera.

Just days ago, Israel’s military ordered a mass evacuation of Palestinians from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. The evacuation order covered the eastern half of Khan Younis as well as a large part of Gaza’s southeastern corner.

“For your safety, you must evacuate immediately to the humanitarian zone,” Army spokesperson Avichay Adraee told residents in a post on X.

The Israeli military’s evacuation order for Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, affected about 250,000 people, according to the UN.

Palestinians in the area also reported receiving evacuation orders through audio messages from Israeli numbers. ​​“We received a message on our mobile phones” to evacuate, a displaced woman identified as Zeinab Abu Jazar was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “Look at these children, how they walk. We did not find a car to ride in.”

Khan Younis was destroyed in an Israeli assault earlier this year, but large numbers of Palestinians had moved back to escape another offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah.

“It’s an unendurable life,” Anwar Salman, a displaced Palestinian told AP. “If they want to kill us, let them do it. Let them drop a nuclear bomb and finish us. We are fed up. We are tired. We are dying every day.”

Earlier, Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch said in a statement: “Governments supporting Israel and Palestinian armed groups should not only use their leverage to stop further abuses, but also to ensure that victims and survivors receive meaningful reparations.”

The OCHA had also previously stated that the number of “Palestinians from Gaza who have been detained by the Israeli military” since 7 October last year “remains unknown”.

Additional reporting with agencies.