Over 1 Million Flee Their Homes In Gaza As Israel Prepares For Ground Attack

Many had tied their mattresses to car roofs, many had suitcases jammed with clothes and photographs. Many had nothing but their exhausted children trudging through streets littered with rubble.

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What's happening?

Entire families could be seen fleeing northern Gaza in cars, trucks, donkey carts and on foot after the Israeli military asked 1.1 million people to evacuate ahead of an expected ground invasion.

Where and when?

The order covers an area of 1.1 million residents, or about half the territory¡¯s population in northern Gaza.

In just 12 hours after the first Israeli warnings, hundreds of thousands of people had either taken to the roads or been forced from their homes by the airstrikes. Others left their homes on Sunday, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said.

¡°At least 1 million people were forced to flee their homes in one week alone. A river of people continues to flow south,¡± said UNRWA, adding ¡°no place is safe in Gaza.¡±

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Why are they leaving?

Many left in fear and chaos after clouds of Israeli leaflets began dropping from the sky, warning civilians to flee the north within 24 hours before they began a full-blown invasion of the Gaza Strip.

¡°Evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families and distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields,¡± an Israeli statement said.

It warned that Israeli forces would ¡°operate significantly¡± in northern Gaza in the coming days, an apparent reference to an expected land offensive being prepared one week after Hamas¡¯ bloody, carefully planned attack on Israel.

Who is responsible?

Israel instructed the residents of north Gaza to move south of the Wadi Gaza wetlands overnight, citing their own safety. Concerns are bolstering over the possibility of an imminent Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, following the terrorist attacks of Palestinian militant group Hamas last weekend. The Israel Defense Forces have since sealed off the Gaza Strip and say their only objective is to remove the military abilities of Hamas.

Human rights groups have criticized Israel over the evacuation order.

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How have the residents reacted?

¡°We left the house without food, without water and without clothes,¡± said Mohammad Hillis, sitting at a wooden school desk scarred by generations of students in a makeshift refugee camp in central Gaza. ¡°We left without taking anything with us.¡±

Earlier this week, Al-Shurafa, a 42-year-old architect married to a dentist, fled her upscale Gaza City neighborhood after her apartment was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. ¡°That was the worst moment of my life, the moment we had to leave, we had leave our memories, our dreams, my dreams, the house that we built together,¡± she said. ¡°We are not young anymore, that was our entire life savings.¡±

¡°Please don¡¯t ask me how I feel,¡± she said. ¡°That is the worst feeling I have ever felt or will ever feel.¡±

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¡°They left their shops and homes,¡± Haifa Khamis al-Shurafa said later Friday, after reaching Deir al-Balah, a central Gaza city that is south of the zone where Israel had ordered the evacuation. ¡°Now, my father is surrounded by his children and is seeing that we have to leave again, that we have to live this again,¡± she said, referring to the 1948 Nakba, or ¡°catastrophe,¡± the term Palestinians use to describe their mass displacement when Israel was founded.