Trapped by poverty and fear: Half a million Gaza City residents cannot afford to flee Israeli assault

• Half a million Palestinians remain trapped in Gaza City as Israel’s military escalates its depopulation campaign with explosive drones, armored vehicles, and airstrikes.
• Civilians face impossible choices: stay and risk death or flee to so-called safe zones that are also bombed, with relocation costs exceeding $3,000 for many families.
• Israel’s “Operation Gideon’s Chariots II” has already displaced 250,000 Gazans in a month, yet 900,000 refuse or cannot leave, fearing permanent displacement like the 1948 Nakba.
• Designated humanitarian zones like Mawasi are overcrowded, unsanitary death traps, struck by over 110 airstrikes, with no hospitals, clean water, or electricity.
• Legal experts and Palestinian leaders warn Israel’s actions—forced displacement, infrastructure destruction, and blockade—meet the legal definition of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The streets of Gaza City are emptying, but not fast enough for Israel’s military. Despite relentless airstrikes, booby-trapped robots, and explosive-laden armored vehicles, nearly half a million Palestinians remain trapped in the war-torn city, unable or unwilling to flee. Some cannot afford the $3,180 average cost to relocate south, where even so-called “safe zones” are bombed. Others refuse to abandon their homes, haunted by the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were permanently displaced as they fear history is repeating itself.

For Dima Abuaita, a mother in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood, the choice is not defiance but desperation. “It’s not that I refuse to save my life and my children’s—it’s that I don’t have a fortune to keep us safe,” she told Middle East Eye. Moving her family would require $1,500 just for transportation, another $600 for a tent, and ongoing rent for land—costs far beyond her reach. Like thousands of others, she watches as Israeli forces advance, detonating remote-controlled “suicide APCs” (repurposed armored vehicles packed with explosives), leveling entire neighborhoods in minutes. “Every day, the Israeli occupation detonates dozens of these vehicles just 10 minutes from where I stay,” she said. “But where would I go?”

A campaign of terror: Robots, explosions, and no escape

Israel’s latest offensive, “Operation Gideon’s Chariots II,” is designed to fully depopulate northern Gaza, building on a months-long campaign that has already killed over 65,000 Palestinians in two years. The military has deployed paratroopers, tanks, and explosive-packed drones, while dropping leaflets warning civilians: leave or be killed. Yet for many, displacement is not an option; it’s a death sentence by another name.

Hala Rohme, a resident of Sheikh Radwan, has moved between shelters but refuses to go south. “We don’t want to leave because we know that if we did, we would never be able to return,” she said.

Her fears are not unfounded. Israel has bombed tents in “safe zones” and targeted displaced civilians fleeing in cars. “It is not worth it to move from one deadly place to another,” she added. Her cousin’s husband was killed when an Israeli explosive vehicle collapsed his home, with shrapnel reaching areas far from the blast. “These robots are the nightmare of this war,” Rohme said. “They have the capacity to destroy entire neighborhoods at once.”

The United Nations confirms that 250,000 Gazans have fled Gaza City in the past month alone, with 60,000 displaced in just 72 hours as troops advanced. Yet 900,000 remain, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office. Some, like Ayman al-Khatib, have lost nearly their entire families—25 relatives killed in a single bombing. “We fled under the bombardment, and we couldn’t find any transport,” he said. Others, like Abu Nader Siam, an elderly man who walked six hours with his wife after their home was reduced to rubble, simply have nowhere left to go. “They left no house or neighborhood except to bomb it,” he told UN News.

The illusion of “safe zones” and the specter of concentration camps

Israel claims southern Gaza offers refuge, but the reality is far darker. The Mawasi area, designated as a “humanitarian zone,” has been struck by more than 110 airstrikes, killing more than 2,000 civilians in massacres. There are no hospitals, no clean water, no electricity… just overcrowded tents and open sewage. The Government Media Office calls it a concentration camp, noting that Israel is attempting to cram 1.7 million people into just 12% of Gaza’s land.

For those who do flee, the journey is grueling and often fatal. Umm Shadi al-Ashkar, a displaced mother, described the scene: “There is death, shelling, bombing, and destruction of houses. Even if they had dropped leaflets, if there had been no shelling, no one would have left.”

Another family, the Rayhans, now sleep on a roadside in Khan Younis, their children covered only by their father’s shirt. “Our children are dying a thousand deaths every day,” the mother said. “At night, the cold consumes them. In the day, the heat devours them.”

A genocide disguised as war

Israel’s actions are not just military operations. They are systematic ethnic cleansing, according to legal experts. The forced displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and blockade of food and medicine fit the legal definition of genocide. Palestinian leaders have warned that this is a premeditated plan to erase Gaza City, much like the Nakba of 1948.

For the half-million Palestinians still in Gaza City, the choice is heartbreaking: starve under siege, flee into bombed “safe zones,” or die resisting displacement.

Sources for this article include:

MiddleEastEye.net

News.UN.org

QODSNA.com

NBCNews.com