Palestinians carrying their belongings on the road to safer places after the Israeli army warned to evacuate the Dawa Department of the Ministry of Finance in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Monday.
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Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images
TEL AVIV, Israel — According to a U.S. Embassy memo obtained by NPR, the Biden administration is urging the Israeli military to make major changes to the “dramatically increased” pace of mass evacuation orders that are displacing tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.
For the first time since the war began last October, the Israeli military lifted an evacuation order and declared that Palestinians could return to their homes in an area in central Gaza on Thursday, a day after a U.S. government memo said officials had urged Israel to rescind evacuation orders that they deemed no longer necessary. An Israeli military spokesman, Nadav Shoshani, told NPR that they had declared the area a safe zone again after operations to stop militant rocket launchers and rescue an Israeli hostage and the body of a soldier.
The August 28 cable from the US Embassy in Jerusalem, marked “sensitive but unclassified” and sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department, contains an assessment by officials from the US Agency for International Development of the impact of Israel’s evacuation order on the Palestinian population.
The document recommends a number of “mitigation measures” including the Israeli military “canceling expired evacuation orders to allow greater freedom of movement, maintaining operations for at least 48 hours after an evacuation order is issued to allow safe movement of civilians, and protecting humanitarian sites, ensuring continued access”.
The document said the United States was concerned that the Israeli military’s stepped-up evacuation of Gaza over the past month had led to continued displacement of Palestinians and reduced the size of the “humanitarian zone” designated for civilians by Israel.
The State Department did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment.
According to the memo, the Israeli military has issued at least 20 evacuation orders in Gaza since July 22, a sharp increase from the previous 10 months of Israel’s ground offensive. Some of those evacuation orders were in so-called “humanitarian zones,” pushing civilians into increasingly smaller areas that the military deemed safe. The United Nations estimates that more than 88% of Gaza currently under evacuation orders.
“Continuing to implement this pace of evacuations could undermine remaining humanitarian operations in the area and, in turn, reduce the ability to continue providing assistance to the 2.1 million people in dire need,” the document said.
Thousands of displaced Palestinians are on the streets looking for shelter after Israeli authorities ordered them to evacuate from what was declared a humanitarian safe zone, east of Khan Younis, Gaza, on July 23.
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“Humanitarian zones” — which the document says have “long been a problem” — are small patches of land that the Israeli military says are safe for Palestinians to shelter from airstrikes and receive humanitarian aid. But Palestinians say the spaces are crowded and dirty, with little access to clean water or bathrooms. Garbage piles up in these areas, leading to disease. Aid groups, meanwhile, say they have become almost impossible to provide aid to these areas.
The document also said that repeated and often forced evacuation orders resulted in civilian harm. The Israeli military “issued evacuation orders under unsafe conditions and repeatedly and with little warning before the operations began, increasing the protection risk,” the document said. The document went on to say that the hostilities “posed a significant protection risk to those complying with evacuation orders.”
NPR has Independent interviews with many civilians in Gaza, who described Israeli airstrikes hitting their area just hours after they were told to evacuate, forcing them to flee in haste and in dangerous conditions.
“If these evacuation orders were intended to protect civilians, they actually did the opposite,” said UN humanitarian coordinator Muhannad Hadi. said in a statement last week. “They are forcing families to flee again — often under fire and with the few belongings they can carry — into an increasingly shrinking, overcrowded, polluted and underserved area.”
The United States, along with Qatar and Egypt, have been trying to bring Israel and Hamas closer to a ceasefire that would eventually end the war in Gaza. As talks continue this week, mediators say they have come up with a proposal that would bridge the gap between the two sides. Israel and Hamas have yet to reach an agreement.
According to Gaza health officials, more than 40,000 Palestinians — many of them women and children — have been killed by Israeli forces in the war. The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people.
