Two elements are particularly striking about the latest evacuation warnings issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to residents and displaced people in central Rafah and a considerable part of northern Gaza.
The first is that the warnings for Rafah were put at the bottom of leaflets and social media posts, almost as if the IDF was trying to downplay the coming offensive. This may be because Israeli military officials have told the media for much of the week that they were carrying out “precise, limited and targeted” operations in the city with the sole objective of seizing the key border crossing with Egypt. This is now clearly not the case, if it ever was.
Such reluctance to highlight the opening of a new and potentially extremely bloody phase in the war in Gaza is unsurprising. For months, Israel’s most senior officials have threatened a full-scale assault into Rafah to eliminate Hamas forces and leaders based in or under the city, and to retrieve some of the Israeli hostages possibly held there. This is seen as essential to accomplishing Israel’s war aims of “crushing” Hamas and ending any threat from the organisation.
Humanitarian officials have warned of a catastrophe if such an attack goes ahead, and Washington made clear it was opposed to any such action without Israel offering a credible plan to safeguard civilians. This, US officials say, they have yet to see. The diplomatic fallout of the new Israeli push is therefore likely to be significant and long lasting.
The second takeaway from the warnings is that they call for the evacuation of areas in northern Gaza that have already been the site of repeated Israeli military operations. This is not the first time the IDF has been forced to return to parts of the territory where they have defeated Hamas forces.
This underlines how hard it has been, and will be, for the IDF to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.
Some of the vast tunnel network built by the Islamist militant organisation during its 16 or so years in power remains intact, there are still some residual stocks of rockets with enough manpower to fire them at Israel, and there is sufficient support or fear, or both, among the population to allow Hamas to operate almost everywhere the Israeli forces are absent.
For political, diplomatic and economic reasons, Israel does not want to keep large numbers of boots on the ground in Gaza, and has failed to build any kind of functioning administration in areas from which it has supposedly expelled Hamas. These choices have helped its enemies, allowing Hamas to return to former strongholds, now often reduced to rubble. Israel is finding itself caught in the classic trap of counter-insurgent warfare, needing a definitive victory while its enemy needs only to survive.
Those who suffer most, as ever, are those caught in the middle: the civilians.
The human consequences of the new offensive are evident already, with up to a million people already on the move or likely to flee Rafah in the coming days. Their situation in the city had been relatively stable for months, with food supplies improving in recent weeks. Prices for some basics had even fallen to pre-war levels. Small quantities of that most precious of all commodities – hope – had even returned among the packed tents and shelters in the city. Now that entire population is being pushed into a new and terrifying precarity.
Famine now exists in pockets of Gaza, even if food is relatively plentiful in parts of the territory. Doctors report losing patients who would otherwise survive injuries, often inflicted by airstrikes, because they are so weakened by months of malnutrition. This is especially true of children, they say. The supposed humanitarian zones designated by the IDF for evacuation offer pitiful provision for the huge numbers who are fleeing towards them this weekend – following the instructions in the leaflets. Those who are packing up their fragile shelters in Rafah are all too aware of this but say, almost unanimously, that they have no choice.
