The Salah al-Din Road is the only way to leave the northern part of Gaza for the south, where Israel has told civilians to go for safety. The road is pocked with airstrike craters and lined by Israeli tanks and the shells of what used to be buildings.
Thousands of desperate people are heading down the road during a daily window in which the Israeli military has said it will guarantee safe passage. The United Nations estimates 15,000 people used the route on Tuesday, three times the number that passed the day before.
News photographs as well as a video released by the Israeli military on Wednesday afternoon, the fifth day the evacuation corridor was open, showed part of their passage: men, women and children moving on foot past half-destroyed buildings, in some cases waving white flags, down a road named for one of history’s most famous Muslim conquerors. They carry small bags, but no suitcases. Some ride on donkey carts, but most are on foot.
The United Nations said that most of those who made the hourslong trip on Tuesday, including children, older people and those with disabilities, traveled on foot with few belongings. It said some arriving in the south reported having to cross Israeli checkpoints, where they said Israeli forces had been making arrests.
The Israeli military denied it had put up checkpoints along the road and maintained Hamas, not Israel, was making the passage south difficult.
But some Gazans who have made or attempted the journey in recent days have described being fired at from the direction of Israeli tanks, despite the promise of safe passage, while others said they had seen bodies, or parts of bodies, scattered around the road. The United Nations is aware of such reports but has not identified who was responsible, said one U.N. official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
On Sunday, Anas Al Kourd, a paramedic at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, drove south with his cousin, whose legs had been amputated after she was wounded in the war, and others, including four children. Theirs was the only car in sight. Around them, everyone held their hands up in a gesture of surrender as they walked, carrying little but white flags, he said.
The evacuations from north Gaza may have accelerated in part because of the sharply deteriorating humanitarian situation there, with food and clean water now nearly nonexistent.