Under Pressure to Displace: Why Thousands in Gaza City Are Forced to Remain in Their Homes Amid Bombardment

Despite ‘frenzied’ aerial bombardment and Israeli ground invasion, Raed Faris and his family remain in Gaza City.

Despite the frenzied Israeli airstrikes and the launch of a full-scale ground invasion, Raed Faris, 38, and his family, like hundreds of thousands of others, have been forced to remain in Gaza City.

Speaking to Al-Estiklal, Faris described what he called “the worst phase of Israeli aggression in two years,” as intensified attacks target both residential homes and tents sheltering displaced families, in what appears to be an effort to force people to flee the city.

On September 15, 2025, the Israeli Occupation Forces  announced the beginning of a wide-ranging ground operation aimed at seizing Gaza City, under what it has dubbed “Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2.” Concurrently, military vehicles began advancing toward the city center.

The aggression began on August 11, 2025, from the eastern neighborhood of Zeitoun in the south of the city, and has included the use of booby-trapped robots to demolish homes, along with artillery fire, indiscriminate gunfire, and an escalation in drone strikes.

Through this operation, “Israel” aims to occupy the city by forcing mass displacement of its residents toward the southern Gaza Strip, where they are being confined to an increasingly narrow area, a move widely viewed as a prelude to large-scale forced expulsion.

The Absence of Alternatives

According to Faris, “the frenzied and direct bombardment with all kinds of weapons on the homes and tents of displaced civilians has thrown people into a state of terror and driven them to flee in numbers that exceed any previous displacement.”

“I am forced, along with my five-member family, to stay in the city, not out of steadfastness in the face of the most brutal war criminals in modern history, but because there are simply no other options,” he added.

This citizen explains that displacement today requires several things, the most important of which are a place to move to, a tent to shelter his family, and a means of transport for both people and belongings.

He confirms that none of these are available. “I couldn’t find an apartment in the south. If I have to stay on the street, I don’t have a tent. And it’s difficult for me to secure transportation,” he says.

He adds that displacement now costs between $3,000 and $5,000 due to the need to buy a tent, pay rent for the place where it will be set up, and cover the high cost of transport. He notes that the amount increases if the goal is to rent an apartment.

“I couldn’t secure any of that, so I preferred to stay in Gaza City for now, despite the increasing danger. But I don’t know if I’ll be forced to leave later if the bombing gets worse and the city becomes isolated.”

The ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza have caused the forced displacement of more than 40,000 people over the past two days, according to the United Nations on September 18.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said in his daily press briefing that the situation in Gaza is worsening by the hour, noting that the Israeli military has issued new forced evacuation orders in the past 48 hours.

“Thousands of people are trying to flee amid continued fighting. As you can imagine and see, the roads are overcrowded, people are hungry, and children are experiencing psychological trauma,” he said.

He confirmed that UN field partners monitoring population movements observed the displacement of about 40,000 people to the south over the past two days.

He noted that since mid-August, around 200,000 people, most of them women, children, and the elderly, have been forced to walk for hours to flee their areas.

Estimates previously indicated that one million people were living in Gaza City, but the number remaining today is around 800,000 or fewer.

The Impossible Displacement

Sameh Sheikh Khalil agrees with Faris about the difficulty of displacement once again, “after we tasted its bitterness before, when we were displaced from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south and stayed there for many long months before we were able to return.”

Khalil, 32, told Al-Estiklal, “If I am displaced today, my wife, my two children, and I will sleep on the street without even a mattress, because I simply cannot afford the cost of transportation or renting a place, even if one is available.”

“Today, the cost of a tent is $1,500, in addition to the cost of a transport vehicle for the displacement, which you have to book and wait for, it takes from one to two weeks before you can get one,” he added.

He described another problem, the suffering caused by overcrowding on al-Rashid Street (the coastal road), where the displacement journey takes between 7 and 10 hours to cover a distance of no more than 20 kilometers.

He explained that displacement has become no different from staying, as the Israeli Occupation Forces targets Palestinians even while they are fleeing, killing them in the streets designated for evacuation and falsely claiming these routes are safe. Meanwhile, the bombing of homes and tents in the south continues.

On the cost of displacement, activist Nezar el-Sairafy asked in a Facebook post, “How do we convince the world that the displacement of Gaza’s northern residents to the south is impossible?”

“There are no tents. If you want to buy one, it costs $1,000, and if you manage to get one, there’s no available space to set it up.”

“And if you want to rent an empty plot of land, you need $500 a month. That’s not including transport, which costs more than $700, and you’ll also need to build a toilet, which costs about $700 too,” he continued.

“To secure all of this, you’ll end up paying even more, because there are no functioning banks in the first place.” He added, “No area is safe. The Israeli army has repeatedly bombed areas it claims are humanitarian or safe zones.”

“How can more than two million people be expected to live on a narrow coastal strip with no shelter, no water, and none of the necessities for life, while the entire world just stands by watching? This is not an evacuation order; this is a demand for torment, displacement, and slow death,” he asked.

Recent reports by international and UN agencies have shown that what the Israeli Occupation Forces claim to be a “humanitarian zone,” where it is ordering civilians to evacuate, constitutes no more than 12 percent of the total area of the Gaza Strip.

As a result, “Israel” is effectively planning to confine more than two million Palestinians in a sealed prison that lacks the most necessary necessities for human life.

According to Gaza’s Civil Defense, the vast majority of the population has been forced to flee their homes between 9 and 12 times due to the ongoing acts of mass killing. 

Of those displaced, 75 percent currently have neither a tent nor the money to buy one, nor do they have access to shelters to house their families, amid extreme overcrowding in a geographically limited area.

Coercive Methods

Despite remaining in Gaza City so far, both Faris and Khalil told Al-Estiklal that displacement may soon become their only option if life in the city becomes impossible.

Faris confirmed that this process has already begun. “Internet service providers, owners of electricity generators, water distributors, and shopkeepers have already left for the south, and food supplies are starting to dwindle,” he said.

“Israel” has already begun isolating around 800,000 Palestinians in Gaza City from the outside world by cutting off communications and internet services, coinciding with the army’s advance into the city’s northwestern neighborhoods.

Ongoing Israeli bombardment, along with the destruction of residential towers and telecommunications infrastructure, has plunged Gaza City into a complete blackout after “Israel” cut the internet entirely.

“We’ve been living in total isolation during the night for about three days,” Khalil explained. “We don’t know what’s happening around us except for hearing the sounds of bombing. During the day, we get rare opportunities to go out and search for signal or internet access, but it’s not available everywhere in the city.”

On September 17, the Palestinian Telecommunications Company announced that fixed internet and landline services had been cut in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression.

“Now, you can sometimes get a mobile signal, but without internet, and only in certain spots, usually places that are slightly elevated,” Khalil said. “But that makes you a more likely target.”

Alongside the communications blackout, “Israel” is making it increasingly impossible for Palestinians to remain in Gaza City, pushing them to flee through various means, including bombing water tanks and targeting solar panels.

Solar panels have become a lifeline for operating water pumps and charging essential devices after electricity was cut off across the entire Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war.

In a move that appears to be aimed at accelerating the exodus, Israeli Occupation Forces recently bombed several residential towers that were sheltering hundreds of people in Gaza City.

Both young men interviewed by Al-Estiklal said their current decision to stay, like that of hundreds of thousands of others, is not final, especially if displacement increases further and food, water, and other basic needs are cut off entirely.

“Dying with the crowd is a kind of mercy,” Khalil said. “Later, I may prefer to flee on foot and sleep on the street if I feel Gaza has turned into a ghost town. We are in deep confusion and still observing people’s movements and the scale of the displacement.”

“We may reach a point where only a few people remain, and those will either be arrested or executed in the streets. So we may soon be forced, against our will, to walk south into the unknown,” he concluded.