The defense establishment is preparing for the next stage on the path to capturing Gaza City, with plans to transfer 100,000 tents to southern Gaza and designated humanitarian zones, a security source said Sunday.
Based on data presented to the defense minister, the tents will be moved to a new humanitarian area near Khan Yunis for the hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from northern Gaza and Gaza City.
“These are donations from international organizations and the UN,” the security source explained.
“We estimate that part of the population will not move with their tent from Gaza. We are already seeing that when an individual or a family decides to relocate, they fold up their belongings and tent, move with them, and set up the tent again. Still, we want to bring in a very large number of tents to facilitate the movement of the population to a safer area.”
The source told Walla: “We will create a kind of humanitarian prioritization of aid to the South in order to draw the population there, but that does not mean that aid will not continue to enter the North in the initial stages, as long as there is a population in the North.”
Infrastructure and humanitarian aid efforts
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) is working to restore infrastructure in the southern Gaza Strip. This includes establishing humanitarian corridors connected to the health system, expanding hospitals, renovating existing hospitals, and enlarging existing field hospitals.
Hamas, the source noted, also maintains a governing and administrative arm divided into different ministries that continue to provide services to the public, including the Information Ministry, the Health Ministry, and municipal functions. The municipalities in the Strip are operating at a very low capacity but are still functioning.
“The second arm is the military one, which the IDF has severely damaged, but parts of it still exist and pose a challenge, and we will continue to fight it and dismantle it,” the source said.
Concerns about epidemics in the Strip
The official also addressed concerns about epidemics and diseases spreading alongside the fighting. “For two years now, and even today, about a million people in the Gaza Strip have been living in tents. Some of them live in houses that were not damaged in the war.
"However, we are doing everything possible to stabilize the humanitarian situation, which involves bringing in resources such as water desalination facilities, sewage and wastewater systems, and enabling the international community to repair and restore all related infrastructure. We are allowing vaccines to enter so the population can remain healthy. We have brought in enormous quantities of polio vaccines, for example. Food convoys have also increased.”
At the same time, the defense establishment is preparing for the possible outbreak of epidemics by expanding medical services and distributing vaccines, especially polio vaccines, following the outbreak that began after the start of the war.