In Northern Gaza, the price of a ride south is out of reach for many
northern Gaza, many people there said doing so was not an option because of cost — and that it was no guarantee of safety.
The Israeli military said Saturday night that it would intensify its already punishing bombardment of the besieged enclave ahead of an expected ground invasion. In Arabic-language leaflets dropped over the Gaza Strip on Saturday, it reiterated calls for people to move south, warning that anyone who did not «may be considered a partner in a terrorist organization.»
But Amani Abu Odeh, who lives in the town of Jabalia in Gaza's north, said that the danger of Israeli airstrikes on the road had pushed up the cost of travel.
Drivers were now charging between $200 and $300 to take a family south, she said. Before the war, the same trip cost about $3 a person.
«We can't even afford to eat,» Abu Odeh said.
«We don't have the money to leave.» Instead, she and other members of her extended family have hunkered down together in one home.
Food, water and other supplies are in desperately short supply in Gaza, where officials say the health system is on the brink of collapse after Israel declared a complete siege of the already blockaded enclave nearly two weeks ago.
More than half of Gaza's more than 2 million residents have been displaced within the enclave, which is about the size of the city of Philadelphia, since Israel launched its retaliatory airstrike campaign. And the leaflets dropped over Gaza calling for more people to move south drew condemnation from Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Designating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who were unwilling or unable to flee as accomplices in terrorism was a threat of
