Red Cross warns Israel against evacuating Gaza City residents

The Red Cross warned on Saturday that any Israeli attempt to evacuate Gaza City would put residents at risk, as Israel’s military tightened its siege on the area ahead of a planned offensive.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said that since dawn Israeli attacks had killed 47 people in the territory already devastated by nearly 23 months of war.

“It is impossible that a mass evacuation of Gaza City could ever be done in a way that is safe and dignified under the current conditions,” International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric said in a statement.

The dire state of shelter, healthcare and nutrition in Gaza meant evacuation was “not only unfeasible but incomprehensible under the present circumstances”.

The Israeli military has declared Gaza City a “dangerous combat zone,” without the daily pauses in fighting that have allowed limited food deliveries elsewhere.

The military did not call for the population to leave immediately, but a day earlier COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body that oversees civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said it was making preparations “for moving the population southward for their protection.”

Gaza’s civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told reporters that 47 people had been killed in Israeli bombing since dawn.

Bassal said 12 people were killed when an Israeli air strike hit “a number of displaced people’s tents” near a mosque in the Al Nasr area, west of Gaza City.

The civil defence agency said 10 people were killed by Israeli fire as they waited near food distribution centres in the central and southern Gaza Strip.

Abu Mohammed Kishko, a resident of the city’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, told reporters that the bombardments the previous night had been “insane”.

“It didn’t stop for a second, and we didn’t sleep all night,” the 42-year-old said.

“We also couldn’t breathe properly because of the smoke bombs -- we were suffocating,” he added.

Israel will soon halt or slow humanitarian aid into parts of northern Gaza as it expands its military offensive against Hamas, an official said on Saturday, a day after Gaza City was declared a combat zone.

The official told reporters that Israel will stop airdrops over Gaza City in the coming days and reduce the number of aid trucks arriving in the territory’s north as it prepares to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people south.

GAZA FLOTILLA: Aid flotillas like the one preparing to leave for Gaza would not be necessary if governments upheld international law, rights activist Greta Thunberg said on Saturday.

“It should not have to be up to us,” said the 22-year-old Swedish campaigner, who will join the flotilla when it sets off from Barcelona on Sunday.

“A mission like this should not have to exist,” she added.

“It is the responsibility of countries, of our governments and elected officials to act to try to uphold international law, to prevent war crimes, to prevent genocide,” she said.

“That is their legal duty to do. And they are failing to do so. And thereby betraying Palestinians but also all of humanity.”

The latest aid expedition towards Gaza is organised by a group called the Global Sumud Flotilla, which describes itself as an “independent” organisation. Sumud is the Arab word for perseverance.

VENICE PROTEST: Thousands protested on Saturday against Israel’s siege of Gaza on the sidelines of the Venice Film Festival, seeking to move the spotlight from movie drama to real-world trauma.

Organised by left-wing political groups in northeast Italy, the demonstration began in the early evening a few kilometres from the festival where George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Emma Stone have walked the red carpet in recent days.

“The entertainment industry has the advantage of being followed a lot, and so they should take a position on Gaza,” Marco Ciotola, a 31-year-old computer scientist from Venice, told AFP at the rally.

Agencies