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Israeli attacks have created deplorable conditions across Gaza, but humanitarian groups say the months-long siege of towns in the north has effectively made the area unliveable.
And they accuse the Israeli army of causing famine and destruction to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians can never return to their homes.
At Gaza City's Yarmouk Sports Stadium, which has been converted into a vast sea of tents for those who have fled the besieged northern areas, everyone a videographer for CBC News spoke to described inhumane conditions.
“It is not just the war that exhausts us. It is hunger that hurts us the most,” said Hashem Yehia el Laham, a 63-year-old father of seven.
“Today people are dying of hunger. There is no food, no water, no clothing and no house,” he said. “This is a genocide.”
On October 5, Israeli forces surrounded the northern town of Jabalia, claiming that Hamas militants had regrouped and were using the town as a base, and that it was necessary for the IDF to move in to dismantle them.
In the days that followed, the IDF told residents to leave and move south as they were destroying most of the roads leading into the area. Night after night, the IDF subjected the communities there to aerial attacks.
It is unclear how many civilian casualties occurred during the ongoing operation. But last week, in two days alone, UNICEF said the Israeli bombing of Jabalia killed 50 Palestinian children.
Damaged infrastructure
Dr. Abu Mughaiseb, deputy medical coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Médecins Sans Frontières) in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, told CBC News he receives daily reports from his staff about patients fleeing towns like Jabalia.
“When you see the infrastructure being destroyed on purpose… I mean, the [attacks on] infrastructure, the water pipes, do not belong to Hamas, sorry to say this. The sewage system is not Hamas, the hospitals are not Hamas… Everything has been destroyed. It means that you do not want the population to continue to live,” said Mughaiseb.
In a statement, Doctors Without Borders said that during the first three weeks of October, Israel facilitated only six percent of coordinated aid flows from the south – where much of the limited aid arrives – to northern Gaza.
The group said the trickle of life-sustaining supplies makes it impossible to provide humanitarian assistance even if the situation worsens.
Recent photos posted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Hear from two people who spoke to a freelance journalist from CBC News in Gaza about what it was like to be forced to leave.
Israeli human rights organizations were the first to raise the alarm that the IDF appeared to be implementing provisions of the 'Generals' Plan'.
Submitted The plan was presented to the Israeli Knesset in September by a group of retired IDF generals and officers and proposed a series of extreme measures to pressure Hamas to release the Israeli hostages captured on October 7, 2023. There are an estimated 100 hostages still in Gaza.
The plan, the rights groups claim, calls for a complete blockade of Gaza's northern areas, including a halt to aid deliveries, along with the forced depopulation and possible starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
IDF insists it 'minimises' damage
An emailed statement to CBC News said it is “taking numerous measures to minimize harm to civilians, including warning the public and removing uninvolved people from combat areas.” The statement stressed that preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes “does not reflect the objectives of the IDF” and will allow humanitarian aid to flow to the north.
Aid groups trying to operate in the area, however, offer a much more damning picture of Israel's actions.
Earlier this week, fifteen United Nations and humanitarian organizations characterized the situation in northern Gaza as 'apocalyptic'. They accused the Israeli government of denying or withholding “basic aid” and “life-saving supplies” to Palestinians who are unwilling or unable to leave the area.
The entire population of the north is “at immediate risk of death from disease, famine and violence”, according to their spokesperson statement.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, has just returned from an extended trip to Gaza and told BBC Radio that the situation in the north resembles a “siege within a siege”.
“This is not self-defense,” he said. “This is the systematic destruction of Gaza.”
Questions about resettlement in Gaza
Two weeks ago, US officials have reportedly pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to confirm that his forces were not besieging the north – reassurances that Netanyahu has so far refused to provide publicly.
The left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz outlined the likely situation in an editorial titled, “If it looks like ethnic cleansing, it probably is.”
The UN considers ethnic cleansing to be one possible part of a crime against humanity, which could potentially fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention.
Also the Israeli NGO Peace Now said this week that the evidence it has seen has convinced its members that “heinous war crimes are being committed in Gaza.”
Peace Now says it believes the ultimate goal is to expel the Palestinian population and establish Jewish settlements in the area – something that would be illegal under international law.
For humanitarian advocates, Israel's behavior in northern Gaza represents another example of how the Netanyahu government can escape responsibility.
“All we see is a lot of hand-wringing on the part of the member states of the United Nations,” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian human rights lawyer based in Haifa, Israel, told CBC News. “But we don't actually see any international action to stop Israel.”
'We see that Netanyahu has a plan'
Many members of far-right Jewish settler groups and political parties have openly advocated depriving Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank of their land as punishment for Hamas's attacks on Israel on October 7, which killed an estimated 1,200 people.
Last month, prominent settler groups, including dozens of Knesset members from Netanyahu's ruling party and several powerful cabinet members, held a second conference to discuss taking over parts of Gaza to create Israeli settlements. They articulated a vision of Jewish settlements along the length and breadth of Gaza, with the current Palestinian population removed.
A kitchen that runs on donations and external funding from international organizations distributed food on Sunday to hundreds of Palestinians waiting with pots and buckets in hands in the area of Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
“We can see that Netanyahu has a plan,” Buttu said. “[The government is] on the recovery of settlements in the north. They have already announced that they have divided Gaza in two, and I fully expect them to rebuild the settlements.”
Before 2005, Israeli settlers had established more than twenty settlements in Gaza, but Israel unilaterally dismantled them and displaced the Jewish population.
Eran Etzion, a former senior Israeli security official, said that while Netanyahu has publicly rejected the prospect of Gaza resettlement, he has done little to stop members of his party from pushing their own agenda, especially Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar. Ben-Gvir.
“After the elimination of the [Hamas] terrorists and the evacuation of civilians, according to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, will mean the recovery of the settlements,” Etzion told CBC News.
Muted response in Israel
He says Netanyahu needs the support of these far-right ministers to stay in power, but also needs military support from the US, which has publicly stated its opposition to Jewish settlements in Gaza.
“What is Netanyahu's real plan regarding North Gaza? That's hard to say. [His] The real plan is to continue the war to consolidate his rule,” Etzion said.
Apart from the human rights groups that raised the alarm about the IDF's actions in northern Gaza, the response within Israel to the accusations of ethnic cleansing has been muted.
'There just isn't one [media] coverage and therefore there is no insight into what is really going on. That's number one,” Etzion said.
'Number two: there is a very deep feeling [that the military action] is justified… [The thinking is,] we have to defend ourselves and to defend ourselves we have to take military action… and there will be innocent civilians who could get hurt in the process.”
