Israel’s latest mass displacement order targeting the entirety of Gaza City is “cruel, unlawful, and inhuman,” Amnesty International warned Wednesday, calling for its immediate cancellation.

The order, issued by the Israeli military on September 9, comes as the occupation escalates its military campaign on the besieged Strip, compounding the already catastrophic suffering of its civilian population.

“For the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City who have endured nearly two years of relentless bombardment while starved, displaced, and crammed into makeshift shelters, this is a devastating and inhuman repeat of the forced displacement of North Gaza in October 2023,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Amnesty has documented harrowing testimonies from residents and medical workers trapped under Israel’s genocidal campaign. A healthcare worker treating children with malnutrition told Amnesty: “I don’t want to leave my patients, the little children whose bodies are too frail to deal with yet another displacement. It’s like having to choose between two deaths: death by bombardment or the slow death of displacement. I have already been displaced 15 times.”

An elderly woman with disabilities, sheltering in Tal al-Hawa after being carried on her son’s shoulders when their neighborhood was destroyed, said she now faces evacuation again.

“Where do we go? To travel south you must pay 4,000 shekels for transport and 3,000 shekels for a tent. We’ve already spent everything we had just to survive.”

Another grandmother, caring for her eight-year-old granddaughter injured in an Israeli airstrike that killed her parents, said: “She is all I have left. We’ve been displaced twice this week already. We are exhausted, we have no means, and nowhere to go.”

Amnesty International has consistently emphasized that the forced displacement of Palestinians within Gaza or their deportation constitutes war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law. The organization said Israel is deliberately creating “conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the population” — a hallmark of genocide.

The group also condemned Israel’s defiance of multiple International Court of Justice rulings that ordered it to ensure the flow of humanitarian aid and protection for civilians in Gaza. Instead, Israel has intensified its bombardment of high-rise buildings where thousands of families shelter, pushing people into further deprivation and suffering.

Amnesty denounced states and corporations that continue to arm and profit from Israel’s campaign, warning that they risk complicity in genocide.

“It is unconscionable that states with leverage over Israel continue to provide it with arms and diplomatic support to destroy Palestinian lives,” Morayef said. “Deplorably, companies and investors are profiting from this genocide while Gaza, with its millennia-old heritage, faces obliteration.”

Amnesty concluded by urging all states and actors with influence to immediately halt arms transfers, stop shielding Israel diplomatically, and press for unfettered humanitarian access. (ILKHA)