Residents of Gaza described the terrible life in the evacuation: “Children drink one sip at a time”

Some Gazans who began evacuating the northern part of the Strip on orders from the Israeli military are returning to their homes in Gaza City due to ongoing Israeli air raids and intolerable living conditions in the southern and central areas of the Gaza Strip.

Maha Hosseini (evacuated to Zawaida in the central part of the strip) admitted in an interview with Al Jazeera that three families who lived in the same house with her have now returned to Gaza City.

“I live in a house with 70 other people. We have limited water supply, no electricity, only one hour a day. In fact, this is our biggest fear: we will run out of water.

When children ask for a drink, we simply give each of them one sip. Today, three families returned home because even in this area, which Israel considered safe, there were many air raids around the house,” said Maha Hosseini.

She added that they try to conserve the only water tank because they don’t know if another will be available.

“The most pressing issues are food shortages as markets are either closed or not being restocked because demand for water and food is so high. In some areas there is absolutely no access to fuel. Some people are unable to move or evacuate their homes.

I saw with my own eyes families, women, children, elderly people who walked tens of kilometers, trying to get to the safe zone, as ordered. Many families are now left on the street, without a roof over their heads, without access to water, without a bathroom, without blankets, without mattresses, without hygiene kits. They remain in the wilderness, without access to information about what will happen and what they should do if the situation worsens,” Hisham Mkhanna, media representative and liaison officer for the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Gaza Strip, told Al Jazeera .

Aid agencies have warned that such large-scale displacement of people would not be possible without a humanitarian disaster.

“People are desperate, emotionally and physically exhausted,” said a resident of the Amal Strip who evacuated to Deir el-Balah from Gaza City.

She added that several families found conditions in Deir el-Balah “unsanitary, no place to sleep, no electricity and no water: no life.” This prompted them to return home.

Al Jazeera’s Yumna El-Sayed, reporting from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, where she also evacuated with her family, confirmed that “the bombing has not stopped” and stores are running low on water and other essentials.

Let us remind you: early on the morning of Friday, October 13, the Israeli military ordered more than a million people to evacuate the northern strip, including the densely populated Gaza City. The directive applies to almost half of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents.

Later that day, thousands of people headed into the southern Gaza Strip in cars, trucks and even donkey carts filled with whatever they could take with them.

But in the South, people did not feel safe and reported crowding into the homes of relatives, friends and even strangers who opened their doors to evacuees.

Some Gaza City residents did not evacuate, saying they had nowhere to go or could not safely cross to the south.

The United Nations estimates that one million people have fled their homes in Gaza since the war began.

The World Health Organization (WHO) strongly condemned Israel’s order to evacuate 22 hospitals in northern Gaza: “Forcing more than 2,000 patients to move to the southern Gaza Strip, where health facilities are already operating at maximum capacity and unable to cope with a sharp increase in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence.”

And in general, the mood of the residents of Gaza is not at all rosy. Evacuation is a forced measure. Few were ready for it.

“Nobody wants to leave their homes. They left out of fear of what was about to happen, and also out of hope that the fighting would end,” summed up a resident of the enclave.

Children increasingly began to experience panic and fear. Esraa has an eight-year-old daughter, five-year-old twin brothers and a two-year-old son. To avoid heavy bombing in their Deir el-Balah neighborhood in the central Gaza Strip, Esraa brought her children to a relative’s house in a less vulnerable area. However, it was not possible to escape hell.

“I can’t see my children trembling and their faces turning pale with horror. It’s too painful,” the woman shared her story with Al-Jazeera correspondents.

Read the material “The checkpoint was not opened, the evacuation was cancelled”: a Russian woman found herself in a terrible situation in Gaza”