'Jabalia Is Being Wiped Out': Gaza Pleads for Help as Israel Intensifies Assault

Israel's latest dayslong assault on besieged northern Gaza intensified Tuesday as the nation's tanks advanced deeper into the Jabalia refugee camp, where terrified residents reported being fired on by the Israeli military as they tried to flee.

Citing eyewitness accounts, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other news outlets reported that Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately at people in Jabalia, who are under Israeli evacuation orders. Residents are being told to move to Al-Mawasi, a badly overcrowded so-called "humanitarian zone" in southern Gaza that Israel's military has attacked repeatedly.

"Drones were firing at everyone passing by on the road," 28-year-old Mohammad Sultan, whose family fled their home in Jabalia, told CNN on Tuesday. Sultan said he and other civilians came under Israeli fire when he returned to grab food, water, and blankets.

"Three people were shot right in front of me," he said. "My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured."

Reuters reported that the warning "Jabalia is being wiped out" was "repeated in many messages posted on social media by residents of Gaza" as Israeli forces assailed the refugee camp and nearby areas, killing dozens of people over the past several days.

"Jabalia is being bombed as if the war has just begun and the world is blind about it," a 60-year-old father of five told Reuters.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that "the threat of yet another massacre in northern Gaza is very real."

"Israel must be ordered to stop assaulting the Palestinians trapped there and withdraw immediately from the occupied Palestinian territory, as already decided by the [International Court of Justice]," she added.

Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist reporting from northern Gaza, wrote on social media Tuesday that "the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous; there are currently hundreds of thousands trapped, and the shelling is nonstop."

"Please share what's happening in the north," he added.

The northern part of Gaza has been utterly devastated by the Israeli military's yearlong assault, carried out with the support of the United States and other world powers. The United Kingdom-based humanitarian group Christian Aid said Monday that mothers in northern Gaza have reported "losing up to 30kg of weight" as the region faces famine conditions fueled by Israel's suffocating blockade and relentless airstrikes.

"We often survive on one meal a day if we can find one," one mother told Christian Aid's partners in Gaza. "My children cry and fall asleep hungry, and I spend nights crying because I am helpless and heartwrenched as their tears of hunger feel like a knife cutting through me, even though I always prioritized them over myself."

Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that at least 56 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past 24 hours, while noting that "the number of deaths reported by sources vary" given the difficulties of counting casualties under Israeli bombardment.

Al Jazeera's Abu Azzoum said the Israeli army is "systematically working to empty northern Gaza."

Such an effort would be consistent with reported Israeli proposals to "liquidate northern Gaza." As +972 Magazine reported last month, prominent Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have "called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza."

"For some, it might be easy to write off Israeli proposals to 'finish the job' in northern Gaza as genocidal bombast, unlikely to be carried out," the magazine added. "Regardless of what happens over the coming months, the very fact that open proposals to starve and exterminate hundreds of thousands of people are up for debate demonstrates precisely where Israeli society stands today."