The Murderous Logistics of Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Northern Gaza
Eyewitnesses say the IDF is starving residents, targeting hospitals, bombing shelters, and murdering civilians in the streets
On Monday, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif posted a photograph from northern Gaza capturing the Israeli military’s brutal depopulation campaign. In the photo, hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children crowd together on a bombed-out street, carrying their few belongings in plastic bags. They all face the same direction, as if moving in procession, holding their ID cards up in the air to an Israeli soldier just out of view. The caption reads: “Ethnic Cleansing in Jabaliya 2024.”
For the past 19 days, the Israeli military has waged a concentrated campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, according to medical staff and eyewitnesses who have been speaking to Drop Site News. The IDF has besieged the area with troops, blocked roads, and constructed earthen barriers, while cutting off access to food, water, fuel, and medical supplies. From the air, it has targeted homes, shelters, schools and hospitals with relentless airstrikes. Quadcopters are shooting civilians in the streets. Amid shelling and demolitions on the ground, soldiers have rounded up residents, arresting hundreds and forcing tens of thousands to march south. “This is the first time since the beginning of the war that the occupation army has besieged an area and then begun a campaign of bombing, killing and starvation in such a complete way,” Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for the Civil Defense in Gaza, told the Palestinian press agency Safa.
In one of the deadliest incidents, at least 87 people were killed or have been reported missing following an airstrike on a residential block in Beit Lahia on Saturday. More than 40 people were injured in the strike, including infants, some of whom were taken to Kamal Adwan hospital. Video shared by the ministry of health shows several children barely clinging to life in the hospital’s intensive care unit, including footage of a months-old baby lying dead next to another severely wounded child covered in gauze and hooked up to tubes receiving treatment.
On Monday, at least 10 people were killed and 30 injured in the shelling of an UNRWA school sheltering displaced Palestinians in the Jabaliya camp after the Israeli military ordered them to evacuate. In Beit Lahia on Tuesday, 15 people were killed in an Israeli drone strike, followed by a tank shelling on a school that had become a shelter for the displaced, killing seven.
The Israeli military on Wednesday released aerial footage showing crowds streaming out of a bombed out landscape and extolling the "tens of thousands" of citizens that have been forced to flee Jabaliya. Al Jazeera also posted footage from Israel’s national broadcaster showing IDF trucks carrying dozens of blindfolded Palestinian men reportedly from Jabaliya.
So far, the assault has claimed the lives of over 770 people, a number certain to go up with countless more casualties lying in the streets and under the rubble in areas Israeli troops have barred emergency crews from accessing. “Israeli forces are executing people in the streets, in shelters, everywhere,” Ismail Al-Thwabta, the spokesperson for the Information Ministry in Gaza, told Drop Site News. Over 1,000 others have been injured and more than 200 civilians have been “kidnapped,” according to the Government Media Office in Gaza, with dozens more missing.
The focus of the military campaign is the northernmost governorate in the Gaza Strip, an area known as North Gaza. The stretch, where some 200,000 Palestinians still remain, includes the cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabaliya, along with Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
The UN Human Rights Office issued a statement on Sunday voicing its concern that Israeli forces in North Gaza are interfering with humanitarian aid and facilitating the forced expulsion of Palestinians. “The Israeli military has taken measures that make life in north Gaza impossible for Palestinians while repeatedly ordering the displacement of the entire governorate,” the office said. Thousands of homes, shelters and other structures have also been destroyed “causing massive and unprecedented destruction,” the Government Media Office in Gaza said in a statement.
Images and video shared by journalists on the ground show large groups of civilians on the street being rounded up, with Israeli tanks positioned next to them. On Monday, Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat posted on X that Israeli forces that day had attacked a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, forcing people out. “Then they lined them up and shot anyone who dared to move. Any male over the age of 16 is being detained, tortured, and investigated,” he wrote. “Many people who are being lined up are sick individuals, such as amputees, cancer patients, and young kids who are being asked to stand in line for hours. The situation is catastrophic.”
As Israeli operations in the north have intensified, its planes are dropping flyers over the area and deploying drones fitted with loudspeakers, warning people that the area will be detonated while they are inside their homes if they do not evacuate immediately. Israeli troops have also bombed and burned down shelters for the displaced.
Amid the carnage, those who have been forced out describe a hellish journey south, made to walk for many kilometers past Israeli tanks and troops.
Fadi Redwan, a 22-year-old resident of Jabaliya refugee camp, was forced to leave his family on October 8 and head to Kamal Adwan hospital for a blood transfusion to treat his thalassemia, a blood disorder that affects hemoglobin levels. “On my way, the streets were a picture of horror and trauma: decomposing bodies gnawed by dogs, children’s skulls here and there, scattered skeletons amid the rubble of homes. I couldn’t do anything as snipers and quadcopters were shooting everyone,” Redwan told Drop Site News. Not long after he reached the hospital, Israeli soldiers encircled and stormed the facility. “They checked my ID, my medical report, and my phone,” Redwan said. “They only gave back my ID and medical report and ordered me and five others like me with thalassemia to head to the south.”
With Apache helicopters overhead, Redwan and several others also seeking care were forced to leave the hospital. “The streets were filled with corpses and piles of rubble and it was difficult to walk straight. Anyone looking left or right was shot dead,” he said. “There were many decomposing bodies and the smell was utterly horrific.” After a 10-hour trek, he reached the Netzarim corridor, a securitized stretch of land established by the Israeli military with bases and checkpoints that divides northern and southern Gaza, where soldiers eventually allowed him to pass through.
Sixteen hours after Redwan was forced out of the hospital, he finally reached Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are crowded into tents on every street with little sanitation or infrastructure, taking refuge with a friend in a tent. “My family was extremely worried about me. When I finally called them, they broke down in tears as they thought I had been killed. I am now a patient and have nothing with me. I was trembling with cold yesterday as I only have this T-shirt,” Redwan said. “It was the first time I had seen Israeli soldiers—it was the shock of a lifetime. I am now without my family. I dream of having the most basic things, such as clothes to get warm and some food to eat. I don’t know how I’ll endure this, but I hope it’ll end and I’ll be back with my family. I am severely traumatized.”
Key to Israel’s campaign in the north has been the targeting of hospitals, Al-Thwabta told Drop Site News. Following repeated attacks, the three partially functioning hospitals in the area—Kamal Adwan, Indonesian, and al-Awda—are almost out of service. Over 350 patients are trapped inside the three hospitals, including pregnant women and people who recently underwent surgery, according to Médecins Sans Frontières.
“Israeli attacks hit Kamal Adwan Hospital today, which remains under Israel’s constant bombings and with no medical aid or supplies,” Al-Thwabta said. “We’ve been calling out the world to allow safe corridors to provide the north with the basic necessities. However, there’s been no response. Even our request to provide healthcare professionals with food was rejected.”
Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said the hospital has run out of blood and a number of wounded have died as a result of the severe lack of resources. “We are now implementing a priority treatment system. This is the reality,” he said. Dr. Eid Sabah, the Director of Nursing at Kamal Adwan Hospital said in an audio message shared with Drop Site that Israeli forces have shelled and closed all roads and streets leading to the hospital, preventing ambulances from reaching the facility, effectively isolating it.
At the Indonesian hospital, “the occupation bombs the generators, cutting off electricity, causing patients to die after being disconnected from oxygen devices,” Dr. Munir Al-Borsh, director-general of the ministry of health, said in a statement. “Doctors and medical staff dig graves to bury the martyrs inside the hospital, which is besieged by tanks, as they are unable to leave.”
And at the Al-Awda Hospital, Israeli forces “have completely surrounded the hospital, and we cannot leave or approach the windows,” Dr. Mohammed Salha, the acting director of the hospital, said in a message. “We only eat one meal a day, which is half a loaf of bread or a small plate of rice. Two days ago, occupation forces fired artillery shells at the hospital, destroying two floors of patients' accommodation and water tanks.”
With Israel continuing to enforce a near-total blockade the humanitarian crisis is becoming catastrophic. On Monday, Israeli forces killed six men in the Jabaliya refugee camp attempting to get drinking water, Al Jazeera reported. Also on Monday, the UN said Israel had, for the fourth consecutive day, denied an urgent request it had made to allow access to the Jabaliya refugee camp to rescue people trapped under the rubble. Israel also denied a separate request by the UN to deliver food, water, and fuel. Farhan Haq, the UN’s deputy spokesman, said Israel also denied 28 UN requests to deliver humanitarian aid to Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahiya between October 6 and 20. Several other requests, he added, “faced impediments.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli military said in a statement that over 230 trucks carrying aid have entered northern Gaza since last week, despite multiple reports from journalists on the ground and humanitarian organizations pushing back on that claim, including the World Health Organization. The group said on Wednesday that when teams were granted access to Kamal Adwan Hospital to evacuate critical patients, their request to bring food, fuel, blood, and medicine was denied.
In a letter addressed to senior Israeli officials dated October 13, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel must take steps in the next month to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza or face potential restrictions on military aid. Yet at the same time, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby stressed in a press briefing that the letter was intended not as a threat, but as a way to “reiterate the sense of urgency we feel and the seriousness with which we feel it, about the need for an increase, a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance.”
Phillippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, posted an urgent message on X on Tuesday:
Nearly three weeks of non-stop bombardments from the Israeli Forces as the death toll increases.
Our staff report they cannot find food, water or medical care.
The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble. Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied.
In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.
They feel deserted, hopeless and alone. They live from one hour to the next, fearing death at every second.
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It is extremely painful to read this description of the hoorifying situation in Northern Gaza, and, at the same time, to realize that the Biden administration bears the major responsibility for it. It reminds me of how I felt when Nixon and Kissinger were bombing Cambodia.
Thank you for your vital and courageous reporting on the US-backed genocide of Gaza.