"We’re going south only today because we were waiting for pause"

Palestinians fleeing south recount their experiences

During the ongoing humanitarian pause, Israeli forces have continued calling and exerting pressure on Palestinians to move to southern areas. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has continued dispatching a daily field observation mission to the Middle Area, to gather information on people’s needs and concerns across the Gaza Strip. The following quotes are from multiple members of a single family, moving south, who stopped to share their experiences with our team on 26 November 2023. 

• “We live in Jabalia. Before the pause, we were moving between our home and Kamal Adwan Hospital: cooking at home and sleeping in the hospital for our safety. But during the past week, the area was heavily bombarded, and we had to stay in the hospital all the time.” 
• “Even the area of the hospital where we were sheltering was bombed. Just before the pause came into effect, the hospital was bombed while we were inside. Thank God we remained intact.” 
• “There are still displaced people in the hospital. They have no place to go to. There are also a few nurses. While we were there, the situation was extremely difficult. Many injured people were not treated and many of the dead bodies were unidentified and remained outside of the morgue for a few days, until dogs started snapping the bodies. If doctors were around, many lives could have been saved. 
• “I just completed the payments for my apartment on Thursday, 5 October, and on Saturday the war started, and I lost my house. It was destroyed. We’re going south only today because we were waiting for the pause.” 
• “We passed through the containers [Israeli checkpoint]. We were divided into groups of eighty people each, and there were about five groups. A person from each group was called by the Israeli soldiers to pass the instructions to the rest of the people. When we crossed the ‘corridor,’ we moved in a queue keeping a metre of distance between one another. There is a face-recognition device we were ordered to look into as we moved. There were no shooting or arrests while we were moving.”