Shifa hospital director to Mada Masr: We were told to prepare a plan to evacuate Gaza City’s hospitals

“The Israeli military told us to prepare a plan for the potential evacuation of Gaza City’s hospitals, but we haven’t received an official evacuation order yet,” Doctor Mohamed Abu Salima, director of the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, told Mada Masr on Thursday evening.

The instructions followed a series of leaflets dropped into Gaza City’s southeastern neighborhoods in recent days as Israel begins the forced transfer of the city’s population —  almost 1 million people — in preparation for its planned invasion and occupation of the city in its entirety.

At the time of writing, Israel’s security Cabinet was reportedly on the verge of approving hastily prepared military plans to capture and ethnically cleanse Gaza City, whose population is set to be forcibly transferred to southernmost Gaza, near the border with Egypt.

The Israeli government’s military logistics agency published a call, later removed from its X account, initiated by one of its officers on Thursday evening to a medic in northern Gaza. "I am speaking with you about the possibility of the army entering Gaza City, there will be a full evacuation to southern Gaza," the transcript read. 

The officer then informs medical staff that they should plan to transfer medical equipment from northern to southern areas  of Gaza in order to “provide care” for patients in the south and “prepare the hospitals to receive patients coming from the north.”

“All that has happened so far is that a medic has received a call demanding that health agencies only put in place a plan to move medical equipment and devices,” said a second medical source in northern Gaza who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There was no evacuation order, nor a timeframe for evacuation.”

The operation, dubbed Gideon’s Chariots II, has been hailed as imminent in Israeli media, with an Israeli military correspondent reporting Thursday that “humanitarian corridors” would be deployed to enact the population’s forced transfer to the south.

Security checkpoints will not be used, the correspondent reported. “With these masses of the population that are being evacuated, it is impossible to filter the population one by one," they wrote on Telegram.

Military calculations circulated earlier this week entail the forced transfer of those displaced to Israeli-occupied Palestinian Rafah, where they are to be confined. 

It would be impossible to accommodate all the expelled residents of Gaza City in the “humanitarian zones in central Gaza and the Mawasi camps that exist today,” the Israeli Army Radio correspondent reported Sunday. “The IDF will be required to withdraw from a certain area that it currently controls in the southern Gaza Strip in order to turn it into a humanitarian zone for hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Gaza City,” they posted on X. 

Israel officials have previously floated plans for a “humanitarian city” in which to confine displaced Palestinians in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. 

In the call published by Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories agency on Thursday, the officer can be heard telling the medic, “we are going to provide you with a place to be, whether it is a field hospital or any other hospital,” adding that healthcare “infrastructures” in southern areas “are being adapted for the absorption” of the sick and wounded.

He also states that these “infrastructures” will be provided with necessary medical equipment “in accordance with the requests of the international aid organizations.”

The few health and international organizations still operating across the strip are already stretched too thin to serve patients in their assigned neighborhoods. Doctors have warned for months of the catastrophic situation for the sick and injured due to the lack of fuel and medical supplies after two years of war and around five months into Israel’s total aid blockade.

The prospect of a major displacement also has implications for Egypt. A government source in Cairo who spoke to Mada Masr early on in the war said that Egypt had already considered the potential scenario in which tens of thousands of Palestinians are pushed toward Egypt’s northeastern border and forced to seek refuge in Sinai, stating that the country was taking “strict measures to ensure the safety of its borders.” Infrastructure has been in place in North Sinai since the early stages of the war, in what the foreign minister at the time called contingency plans.

Though fullscale operation launch has yet to be announced, Israeli forces have already invaded Gaza City’s southeastern neighborhood of Zeitoun, where relentless bombardment by air and at street level has killed dozens over the past 10 days. 

The Israeli military advanced further west into the Sabra neighborhood earlier this week, while a newly deployed battalion has begun to close in on the metropole from the north.