The Israeli military on Monday morning began calling on Palestinians to evacuate the eastern neighborhoods of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip that are close to the Israeli border, ahead of a planned ground offensive in the area.
The civilians were being called to move to an expanded humanitarian zone in the al-Mawasi and Khan Younis areas of southern Gaza.
At 8 a.m. the Israel Defense Forces started to drop flyers in eastern Rafah, send text messages, and make phone calls to Palestinians with instructions on the areas that need to be evacuated, and which routes to take to a designated humanitarian zone.
The evacuation order only applied to some of the eastern neighborhoods of Rafah, and not the entire city in southern Gaza for now, although Israel has vowed to operate throughout the area, considered to be Hamas’s last major redoubt.
Israeli officials have said the terror group has six remaining battalions in the Gaza Strip, four of them in Rafah: Yabna (South), Shaboura (North), Tel Sultan (West) and East Rafah. Two more Hamas battalions remain in central Gaza, in the Nuseirat and Deir al-Balah camps.
A senior official in Hamas said the evacuation order was a “dangerous escalation that will have consequences.”
“The US administration, alongside the occupation, bears responsibility for this terrorism,” the official, Sami Abu Zuhri, told Reuters, referring to Israel’s alliance with Washington.
More than a million Palestinian civilians are sheltering in Rafah. Around 100,000 were estimated to be in the zone where the IDF called for evacuation, Army Radio reported.
A map published by the IDF showed that the zones that are to be evacuated included the Rafah crossing area on the Egyptian border. Three of Hamas’s Rafah battalions — Yabna, Shaboura, and East Rafah — are also located in the area that was being evacuated.
The military said in a statement that “in accordance with the approval of the political echelon, the IDF calls on the population, which is under the control of Hamas, to temporarily evacuate from the eastern neighborhoods of Rafah to the expanded humanitarian zone.”
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