Hamas is preventing civilians from evacuating northern Gaza

A resident of Jabalia said that Hamas is hitting Palestinians to prevent them from following IDF evacuation orders.

By JNS

Hamas terrorists are preventing Palestinian civilians in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia from evacuating to humanitarian zones amid the Israel Defense Forces operation in the area, the military said on Monday.

During a call with a representative of the Intelligence Corps’ Unit 504, a resident of Jabalia said that Hamas is hitting Palestinians to prevent them from following IDF evacuation orders, according to a recording.

“The problem is that when we follow the army’s instructions and try to go to Al-Mawasi [humanitarian zone], there are people who come out against us and start hitting us with sticks, telling us ‘Go back, go back,’” the Jabalia resident told a military representative in the IDF recording.

“What should we do?” the Gazan asked the IDF. “We want to leave. We took our belongings and wanted to leave, and now they’re hitting us and telling us to ‘go home, go home,’ what should we do?”

The Palestinian stressed the attackers were not members of the Israeli army but from Hamas and that “they keep hitting us and returning us.”

The army noted in a statement, “While the IDF makes every effort to move civilians away from the battlefield, Hamas continues to make every effort to keep civilians in the line of fire.”

IDF soldiers have been operating in Jabalia since Oct. 6 to prevent Hamas from reestablishing its terrorist presence in the city.

Ahead of the raid, the military urged all noncombatants to evacuate to the expanded Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone, which has field hospitals, tents, food, water, medicine and medical equipment.

On Monday, the IDF announced that three of its divisions “continue to operate throughout Gaza and have eliminated terrorists in face-to-face encounters and airstrikes in the past day.”

IDF soldiers “continue to destroy terrorist infrastructures, locate weapons, locate tunnels and neutralize them,” the military said.

In Jabalia, at least 10 terrorists were killed in Air Force strikes and close-quarters combat over the past day, the IDF said on Sunday night.

In central Gaza, special forces operators from the IDF’s Multidimensional Unit killed some 10 gunmen who posed a threat to the forces using “precision weaponry and attack drones,” the statement noted.

Israeli ground forces entered the Palestinian coastal enclave following a weeks-long air campaign in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks in the northwestern Negev, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, wounded thousands of others, and abducted more than 250 men, women and children to the Strip—97 of whom are still there, along with four others who entered Gaza earlier.

Jerusalem’s war goals for Gaza are to destroy Hamas’s capabilities, ensure that it cannot threaten Israel again, and return all captives.

The death toll among Israeli troops since the start of the Gaza ground incursion stands at 352, and at 739 on all fronts since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre, according to official IDF military data.