Hamas shooting Gazan civilians who try to evacuate Jabaliya, IDF paramedic says
Civilians in Gaza are being shot by Hamas terrorists while trying to evacuate from Jabaliya in the north of the Strip amid a renewed IDF offensive, an Israeli paramedic alleged in an interview Monday after she was photographed providing medical treatment to a Palestinian woman suffering from wounds to the face.
Cpl. Shai Gilboa, who is serving as a paramedic in the IDF’s 9th Battalion, told Channel 12 that a photograph of her tending to a woman with an injury on her lower face was the result of Hamas’s attempts to prevent civilians from heeding Israeli orders to evacuate to designated safe zones as fighting rages anew across northern Gaza.
“Our battalion went into action to exert as much military pressure as possible on Hamas terrorists, who held the civilian population in the area and forbade them from evacuating to a safe area,” Gilboa recounted.
During the operation, she said, terrorists in the area had opened fire and wounded some of the Gazans who were trying to flee.
“The wounded came to us and we provided them with first aid in the field, which mostly entailed stopping the bleeding,” she said.
From there, she explained, they were evacuated from the area and directed toward “local medical forces” in the area for further treatment.
She said that while her battalion’s primary objective is to “fight against and subdue” Hamas activity in northern Gaza, they are also determined to evacuate as much of the civilian population to safety as possible.
Asked whether the civilians speak to the troops, and what the relationship is between the Israeli forces and the Palestinians in the war-torn areas they are sent to operate in, Gilboa admitted that the language barrier was one of several reasons that interactions tended to be limited.
“But they smile at us, they wave goodbye at us,” she said, “they curse Hamas in front of us.”
“Not only are they not afraid of us, a lot of them are on our side,” she added.
The IDF said earlier this week that hundreds of Palestinian civilians have listened to calls for them to evacuate Jabaliya in recent days amid a renewed IDF offensive aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping in the area.
The evacuations were taking place despite the Hamas-run interior ministry ordering civilians earlier this month to ignore the instructions to relocate to other safer areas in the Strip, because “the occupation is conducting continued bombing and killing every day in the areas it claims to be safe.”
The terror organization further accused Israel of carrying out an intentional “massacre against the civilians” in Jabaliya as a way to punish them for refusing to leave their homes.
Reports of Hamas harming civilians trying to flee to safer areas of Gaza are not new, and the IDF has for years accused the terror group of using human shields and embedding its operatives deep within the civilian population to protect itself amid fighting with Israel, and says that it seeks to avoid civilian casualties.
Earlier in October, the IDF published a recording of a conversation that it said was between a Gazan man and an Israeli soldier from Unit 504, responsible for human intelligence on the battlefield, in which the purported Gazan said that Hamas was beating residents of Jabaliya and preventing them from leaving.
“The problem is that we listen to the army’s instructions and want to leave to the Muwasi [humanitarian zone], but there are people who come out against us and start hitting us with sticks,” the man allegedly said to the soldier.
“We want to leave,” he continued. “We took our things and we want to leave now and they are hitting us and telling us to return home. What can we do?”
The IDF did not say when the conversation took place.
Israel estimates that tens of thousands of Palestinians have remained in northern Gaza throughout the last year of fighting, despite repeated calls for them to evacuate to designated humanitarian zones. It believes that among those who stayed there are thousands of Hamas operatives who survived previous rounds of fighting with Israeli forces.
Israel has been at war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 42,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel said it had killed some 17,000 combatants in battle as of August, in addition to 1,000 terrorists killed inside Israel on October 7.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 357.
Source » timesofisrael.com
