Israel Orders Palestinians to Leave Gaza City Once Again

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal war to obliterate the Palestinian people reached a new low in viciousness this week, via a triple-header of slaughters and falsehoods which have become far too common.

On July 9, the IDF ran an air raid on the al-Awdah school in the Abasan al-Kabira, located not far from Khan Younis, located in the southern part of Gaza. Videos from the scene showed the shocking before and after of the event, starting with scenes of Palestinian youth attempting to divert themselves from the bloody genocide rocking around them by playing a game of soccer, followed by explosions and smoke as the IDF forces shelled school buildings behind them. Adults and children alike screamed and scattered, both away from the scene to escape what they saw as the IDF’s principal targets this time, and towards the buildings to see if family, friends, and teachers they knew there were dead or – for the luckiest of those found in the bombed-out remains of the school – at most badly injured but still alive, and with a chance of being rescued.

Al-Awdah was run by the United Nations Palestinian Relief Works Agency (UNRWA). That is the same agency Netanyahu has attempted to prove was infiltrated with thousands of Hamas personnel months ago, a story which even now has never been proven, was thoroughly investigated by the UN and third parties and found to be almost entirely false, and yet continues to reappear in headlines around the world as the truth.  

The Al-Awdah school was being used as a shelter for hundreds of Palestinian civilians rendered homeless in the continued onslaught. It is an area the Israeli government had approved for refugees to gather. As a school, it is officially blocked for targeting in war under multiple international guidelines.

After the wreckage from the attack was combed for bodies, official reports showed the IDF shelling of the school murdered at least 31 and injured another 53.

A Palestinian interviewed by the BBC afterwards expressed anger at Israel having led those staying in and around the school to believe they would be all right there, and then proceeding with the air raid anyway.

“They said it was a safe place,” the young man told the reporter. “that there [was] water and food, there were schools and everything … Suddenly a rocket comes down on you and all the people around you.”

IDF spokespersons insisted they bombed the school because they had intelligence saying Hamas had operatives based there.

It is estimated the IDF killed close to a hundred innocent Palestinians near the school area and

This was the fourth attack carried out by Israel’s military on schools in Gaza in four days.

Then yesterday the Israeli Defense Forces ordered all Palestinians to leave Gaza City, the largest city in the strip and which at one time had a population of almost 600,000 people. It is in northern Gaza.

As in past mass evacuations directives, the IDF announced it was about to launch another bloody series of attacks in that area via a mass leaflet drop which were dropped by air across the city in the morning. The leaflets called for “everyone in Gaza City” to get out as soon as possible. The Palestinians were told to flee southwards once again, towards az-Zawayda and Deir el-Balah, and to get there via “safe routes”, whatever that phrase could possibly mean in a region where Israeli forces are currently escalating their genocidal ground attacks on all.

The threat to push out the Palestinians was ostensibly to allow Israeli’s military free reign to blow up any buildings they wish and kill whoever remains in the city.

This time neither the United Nations nor the Gaza government’s Interior Ministry bought into these latest IDF directives, each for different reasons.

The Interior Ministry, for the first time it appears, actively urged those in Gaza to ignore the IDF leaflet instructions. They said there were sadly no longer any other safe places left for Palestinians, and that this was just another piece of psychological warfare being played on a population already terrorized on so many levels by the fascist Israeli government.

Stephane Dujarric, an official spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said the Israel’s new evacuation orders would “only fuel mass suffering for Palestinian families, many of whom have been displaced many times”.

During the current phase of the bloodbath inflicted on Gaza by the Israeli occupation, almost every time Palestinians have been told to leave a region and directed to another one which would allegedly remain safe, the IDF has moved into those safe regions less than two months later to bombard the camps the refugees relocated to.

The psychological warfare allegation attached to the new evacuation orders is also being applied to Israel suggesting it is serious about negotiations for a potential ceasefire between it and Hamas currently ongoing in Doha, Qatar. Netanyahu continues to say there will be no end to the war until Hamas is wiped out, so even if there is one, it will not provide an end to Israel’s reckless mass killings.

News also broke over the last few days that confirms almost everything Israel has been saying about the Hamas invasion of northern Israel on October 7 is a lie.

According now to multiple sources from within Israel itself, when Hamas did bring in paratroopers and launched its attack at the Israeli music festival on October 7, it is now highly probable that a significant percentage – perhaps even a majority – of the 1,173 people who died that day were killed by Israel’s own military.

This weekend the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported it had concluded a detailed investigation about the Hamas attack and Israel’s response to it. It confirmed that roughly 1,139 Israelis were killed during the assault. 764 of those were civilians and 373 were Israeli military personnel.

What it also confirmed was something disclosed earlier by Israeli soldiers talking publicly in broadcast interviews or in brief news reports, but which had been suppressed up to this time. That something was that when the IDF forces arrived on the chaos of the October 7 invasion, they had invoked something the government refers to in secret as the “Hannibal directive”.

That directive, sometimes referred to as the Hannibal Protocol, used in extreme situations where Israeli forces might be captured in large numbers when they engage in battle, authorizes the Israeli military to use maximum firepower to avoid even the smallest chance an Israeli soldier might be taken prisoner. It does not seem to matter how many of the soldiers might be killed in the process or how many civilians might also die when the protocol goes into effect.

This issue was originally brought up only weeks after the October 7 attack but was widely suppressed and explicitly rejected when Netanyahu was confronted with the information. At that time that this unusual order was first revealed by Yehuda Shau, a former line soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, during an interview with Al Jazeera.

When that “protocol” is initiated by the Israeli military, Shau said, “You will open fire without constraints, in order to prevent the abduction.”

Shau also said the same protocol authorizes the use of the equivalent of blind deadly force to allow bombing, shelling, and mass shootings on roads, highways, crossroads, and paths where a hostage might be transported alive away from a battleground.

In all cases, when the “Hannibal” order was given, dead Israeli soldiers and civilians were considered necessary collateral damage to avoid capture of

Though Israel continues to deny the Hannibal Protocol even exists as part of its warfare instructions set, that is also a lie. Recordings intercepted during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza show it was used freely at that time and referred to by the same name.

Shau’s story was backed up in a separate news report which came out on November 12, 2023. That covered testimony by Tuval Escapa, part of the Kibbutz Be'eri security team which was assisting with civilian affairs during the October 7 raid.

"The commanders in the field made difficult decisions, including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages,” Escapa told his interviewers.

By itself, Escapa’s statements seemed impossible to believe, showing Israel could and did give orders allowing mass slaughter of their own soldiers and civilians if it meant even one soldier might not be captured. But with the history of the Hannibal Protocol confirmed in the earlier interview and now a detailed investigative study by Haaretz, the evidence points to Israel perhaps responsible for most of the deaths during the Hamas raid on October 7.

The only conclusion possible is that Israel deliberately withheld who was responsible for what deaths on that day. It does not remove Israel’s ability to claim it “has the right to defend itself”, but even that argument rests now on far thinner ice since its military easily killed and maimed hundreds of Israelis during the October 7 tragedy.

Though not proven yet, it could be a variant of the Hannibal logic is behind why so many of Israel’s “rescues” of just a handful of Israeli military captives in Gaza came along with the needless killing of dozens of innocents sheltering nearby. This is likely so because it involves the same logic and value system, that Israelis are more important than Palestinians, and a dead Israeli soldier is more acceptable than Hamas holding one captive.

The reckless air raid which killed so many Palestinians at al-Awdah on July 9, another forced mass evacuation of Palestinians in Gaza City announced yesterday, without any assistance coming from anyone, and that Israel is responsible for much of the October 7 massacre, shows the contempt Israel has for human life or holding itself accountable for its action, and the deceit it continues to foster on the world at large.