Fear, bombs and screams stalk Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where Israel's resumption of strikes three weeks ago has sparked fresh displacement and an ever more desperate search for shelter.
"They are asking for evacuation, but where will we go?" asked Mahmoud Hussein, who fled bombardments in the north to live in a tent in the central town of az-Zawayda.
"There is nothing, nothing," he said, listing off several nearby areas marked for evacuation on a map published by the Israeli army.
Since its renewed strikes and ground operations, the Israeli army has issued a raft of evacuation orders for locations in the north, south and centre of the Gaza Strip, warning residents of imminent attacks.
Nearly 400,000 Gazans have been displaced since March 18, the UN said Monday.
Israel struck Deir el-Balah overnight from Sunday to Monday, Gaza's civil defence agency said, and Hussein along with the other inhabitants of his makeshift tent encampment fled to a nearby field hospital.
On Monday morning, the group began packing up their things once again, in search of an area away from the evacuation zones.
Adults filled fraying plastic bags with the few belongings they had left, while children milled around nearby.
Donkey carts laden with mattresses trundled along the dusty road, while women carried baskets on their heads.
It is now a familiar scene in Gaza, where almost all of the 2.4 million inhabitants have fled their homes, many of them multiple times, according to the United Nations.
'No glimmer of hope'
Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. Efforts to restore the truce have so far failed.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said Tuesday that at least 1,449 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations, taking the overall deaths since the start of the war to 50,810.
The war was triggered by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
In Deir el-Balah, an overnight Israeli air strike targeted a house, killing nine people including five children, Gaza's civil defence agency said.
In the aftermath, AFPTV footage showed a plastic chair, blankets and a bright red children's bathtub trapped between two collapsed floors of a house.
Palestinians desperately scrambled through the rubble to retrieve a body, which was carried down the stairs in a blanket and loaded on the back of a truck.
"We rushed out in terror, not even knowing at first where the strike had hit," said Abed Sabah, a relative of the targeted house's owner.
"It was the thick cloud of dust that told us it was nearby."
Sabah said they had managed to pull out 11 bodies, "most of them children and women."
A young girl sat in the midst of a sea of rubble and metal rods, surrounded by rolls of toilet paper, blankets and a battered foam mattress.
At the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, bodies arrived in white plastic shrouds. Relatives cried and recited prayers over the blood-stained body bags laid out on the floor.
An elderly woman hobbled through the crowd of mourners, struggling to hold back sobs.
"The house was full of displaced people and children. Four children were decapitated -- what was their fault?" asked Nadeen Sabah, weeping as she spoke.
Sabah claimed to have been in the building at the time of the attack.
Amal Jabbal, 35, said she had left Deir el-Balah on Monday after being woken up by "the screams of the neighbourhood".
She said she left before a strike "that shook the whole area".
"The destruction was massive and the fear even greater," she said. "There is no glimmer of hope."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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