As Israel’s four-day truce with Hamas came into effect in Gaza on Friday morning, thousands of people who had fled to areas near Gaza’s border with Egypt were seeking to return to their villages with children and pets in their arms and their belongings loaded onto donkey carts or car roofs.
Overnight Thursday-Friday, Hamas urged Gazans to return to the north of the Strip, where the IDF has focused its ground offensive for the past three weeks. The truce deal, under which the Gaza-governing Hamas terror group is set to free 50 Israeli hostages over four days from Friday, bars Gazans from returning to the north of the Strip.
Having dropped flyers warning Gazans against doing so, Israeli troops were reported to be using riot dispersal measures inside the Strip on Friday in order to prevent people from moving north and complicating Israel’s declared determination to resume its war to destroy Hamas at the end of the truce.
AP reported on Friday afternoon that Israeli troops fatally shot two Palestinians and wounded 11 others as they headed toward the main combat zone in northern Gaza despite the IDF warnings to stay put. There was no immediate comment from the IDF.
Thousands, if not tens of thousands, were moving north by early afternoon, Israeli military experts said, even though they generally have no homes to go back to in the war zone.
The IDF had vowed to prevent Palestinians from returning to northern Gaza from its south during the truce.
Hamas is trying to encourage many of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who evacuated south to return, said retired general Israel Ziv, a former head of IDF operations, in order to “completely disrupt” Israel’s military campaign to destroy the Gaza-ruling terror group.
“Hamas has no problem sacrificing all the residents of Gaza, as it has proved,” said Ziv.
Ziv said he expected Hamas to intensify this effort over the four planned days of the truce, presenting “a very complex challenge” as the IDF seeks to resume the campaign when the halt in fighting is over.
So far, he said, the IDF was using “limited force” to try to prevent Gazans from returning to the north of the Strip.
A senior officer in the IDF Southern Command said Friday afternoon that troops would respond to any attempt at harming them amid the ceasefire, while the army spends its time preparing for the resumption of the fighting.
“Anyone who poses a threat to our forces will be hit. The security of our forces is a top priority; that’s how we behaved and that’s how we will continue to behave,” the officer said. “We are preparing to continue attacking with all our strength immediately after the end of the truce.”
On Thursday, the commander of the IDF Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, was in the northern Gaza Strip with troops to assess the deployment of forces on the temporary ceasefire lines and approve operational plans.
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