Palestinians scrambled to flee northern Gaza on Saturday after the Israeli military ordered nearly half the population to evacuate south and carried out limited ground forays ahead of an expected land offensive a week after Hamas’s bloody, wide-ranging attack into Israel.

Israel renewed calls on social media and in leaflets dropped from the air for some 1 million Gaza residents to move south, while Hamas urged people to stay in their homes.

The UN and aid groups have said such a rapid exodus would cause untold human suffering, with hospital patients and others unable to relocate.

Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with possessions crowded a main road heading away from Gaza City as Israeli airstrikes continued to hammer the 40km-long territory, where supplies of food, fuel and drinking water were running low because of a complete Israeli siege.

Egyptian officials said the southern Rafah crossing would open later Saturday for the first time in days to allow foreigners out. Israel said Palestinians could travel within Gaza without being harmed along two main routes from 10am to 4pm local time.

The Israeli military said “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians had already heeded the warning and headed south.

But some live up to 20km away, and roads demolished by airstrikes and fuel shortage hindered their journeys.

Thousands of people crammed into a UN-run school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah, a farming town south of the evacuation zone. Many slept outside on the ground without mattresses, or in chairs pulled from classrooms.

“I came here with my children. We slept on the ground. We don’t have a mattress or clothes,” Howeida al-Zaaneen, 63, who is from the northern town of Beit Hanoun, said. “I want to go back to my home, even if it is destroyed.”

The military said its troops conducted temporary raids into Gaza to battle militants and hunted for traces of some 150 people — including men, women and children — who were abducted during Hamas’s shocking October 7 assault on southern Israel.

The Gaza health ministry said on Saturday that over 2,200 people had been killed in the territory, including 724 children and 458 women.

The Hamas assault killed more than 1,300 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, and roughly 1,500 Hamas militants were killed during the fighting, the Israeli government said.

Fearing a mass exodus of Palestinians, Egyptian authorities erected “temporary” blast walls on Egypt’s side of the heavily guarded Rafah crossing, which has been closed for days because of Israeli airstrikes, two Egyptian officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief the media.

Gaza raids

Raids into Gaza on Friday were the first acknowledgement that Israeli troops had entered the territory since the military began its round-the-clock bombardment in retaliation for the Hamas massacre.

Palestinian militants have fired more than 5,500 rockets into Israel since the fighting erupted, the Israeli military said.

The military said the ground troops left after conducting the raids.

Israel has called up some 360,000 reserves and massed troops and tanks along the border with Gaza, but no decision has been announced on whether to launch a ground offensive.

An assault into densely populated Gaza would likely bring even higher casualties on both sides in brutal house-to-house fighting.

“We will destroy Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Friday night.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken met Saudi Arabian foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan in Riyadh on Saturday, and both called for Israel to protect civilians in Gaza.

“As Israel pursues its legitimate right to defend its people and to trying to ensure that this never happens again, it is vitally important that all of us look out for for civilians, and we’re working together to do exactly that,” Blinken said.

Hamas said Israel’s airstrikes had killed 13 hostages, including foreigners. It did not provide their nationalities. The military denied the claim. Hamas and other Palestinian militants hope to trade the hostages for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The Israeli public is overwhelmingly in favour of a military offensive, and TV news broadcasts focus heavily on the aftermath of the Hamas attack and make scarce mention of the unfolding crisis in Gaza.

In the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry says 53 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, including 16 on Friday.

The UN says attacks by Israeli settlers have surged there since the Hamas assault.

Mass evacuation

The Israeli military’s evacuation call affects 1.1 million people and would force the territory’s entire population to cram into the southern half of the Gaza Strip as Israel continues strikes across the territory, including in the south.

Egyptian officials said an agreement was reached to allow foreigners to exit Gaza via Rafah on Saturday afternoon.

One official said both Israel and Palestinian militant groups had agreed to facilitate the departures and that talks were still underway about getting aid into Gaza through the same crossing.

The officials were not authorised to brief journalists and spoke on condition of anonymity. Palestinian families in Gaza faced agonising dilemmas in deciding whether to leave or stay.

Israeli strikes have levelled entire city blocks. A siege declared earlier in the week cut off food, water and medical supplies, and the territory was under a near-total power blackout.

An Israeli military spokesperson, Jonathan Conricus, said the evacuation was aimed at keeping civilians safe and preventing Hamas from using them as human shields. He urged people in the targeted areas to leave immediately and to return “only when we tell them that it is safe to do so”.

“The Palestinian civilians in Gaza are not our enemies. We don’t assess them as such, and we don’t target them as such,” Conricus said. “We are trying to do the right thing.”

The US and Israel’s other allies have pledged iron-clad support for the war on Hamas. The EU’s foreign policy chief, however, said on Saturday that the Israeli military needed to give people more time to leave northern Gaza.

Josep Borrell welcomed the evacuation order but said, “You cannot move such a volume of people in (a) short period of time,” noting a lack of shelters and transportation.

Gaza’s health ministry said it was impossible to safely transport the wounded from hospitals already dealing with high numbers of dead and injured.

Patients and personnel from the Al Awda Hospital in Gaza’s far north spent part of their night in the street “with bombs landing in close proximity”, the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said.

Scott Hamilton, a spokesperson for the aid group, said some of the medical staff and all patients were moved to another location, “but the situation remains extremely complicated and chaotic”.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said many people were relying on dirty water from wells as desalination plants shut down for lack of fuel. “Fuel is the only way for people to have safe drinking water,” Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, said. “If not, people will start dying of severe dehydration, among them young children.”

Where to go?

Hamas’s media office said airstrikes hit cars in three locations as they headed south from Gaza City, killing 70 people. Two witnesses reported a strike on fleeing cars near Deir el-Balah.

Fayza Hamoudi said she and her family were driving from their home in the north when the strike on the road hit some distance ahead and two vehicles burst into flames. A witness from another car gave a similar account.

AP/PTI