As artillery and bombs pound around Gaza’s largest city and Israel promises a punishing new offensive, Palestinians in the city are paralyzed with fear — unsure whether to go and what will happen if they do.

Israel has declared Gaza City, in the north of the territory, to be a combat zone while the military moves forward with plans to overtake it in a campaign to push Hamas into submission. Parts of the city are already considered “red zones,” where Palestinians have been ordered to evacuate ahead of expected heavy fighting.

That has left residents on edge, including many who returned after fleeing the city in the initial stages of the Israel-Hamas war. With Israeli bulldozers razing the ground in neighborhoods already occupied by the army and Israeli leaders supporting the mass relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, many fear departing the city now could mean leaving for good.

Moving costs thousands of dollars and finding space in the overcrowded south to pitch a tent feels impossible. But staying behind, they say, could be deadly.

“The Israeli forces, when they mark any area by red color and they request the people to leave, they really will destroy it,” said Mohammed Alkurdi, who is sheltering in Gaza City along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians.

“So it’s like you decide whether to live or die. It’s very simple like that.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has framed the Gaza City operation as “the decisive blow against Hamas,” describing the area as home to the terror group’s most significant redoubt and the key to freeing hostages remaining in Gaza. But international humanitarian groups warn that Israel’s plans to displace the city’s residents will worsen already crisis-level conditions for Gazans facing food shortages and combat-related dangers.

Despite the looming danger of the coming offensive, Gazans in the city say no place in the Strip is safe, and there is nowhere for them to relocate to anyway. Many also expressed fatigue after earlier displacements during earlier bouts of fighting, and noted the difficulties and costs involved in relocating, especially for the elderly, infirm, or malnourished.

“I think everyone [in Gaza city] is terrified, and there’s a lot of worry, but there’s also a lot of defiance because people are just sick and tired of moving,” said Olga Cherevko, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who has been in the Gaza Strip for the last year and nine months. “They’re saying they’re not going to move anymore because what’s the point? When they did move, they were bombed in those places too.”

Israeli defense officials estimated Wednesday that 70,000 to 80,000 people had fled the city so far, most of them in the past 72 hours, after Israel declared the area a combat zone on Friday. The figure is far short of the city’s estimated one million residents, though officials expect departures to continue as the IDF presses its campaign.

The Site Management Cluster, a joint humanitarian body that coordinates assistance for people in displacement sites, said some 14,840 Palestinians had left their homes in the city as of Monday, most to flee south.

A fraction of them, about 2,200, have moved to new places within Gaza City after being displaced by Israeli attacks, it said.

Hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents fled during the first major evacuation at the end of 2023, but about 650,000 are thought to have returned during a ceasefire in January 2025, after Israel withdrew from positions blocking movement between north and south Gaza. An additional 250,000-300,000 people never left the city throughout the fighting, even during the heaviest ground operations, according to estimates.

Alongside residents still living in damaged apartment blocks, satellite images also reveal tens of thousands of makeshift tents housing displaced people who returned during the ceasefire or were uprooted from other northern areas and have nowhere else to go due to the massive destruction.

Many of the people who moved back to the north during the ceasefire in January had hoped to find their homes intact. Alkurdi’s home was completely destroyed, so he’s now living alone in a western area of the city. His children and wife were able to leave Gaza last year. He said he would flee south if his home fell under an evacuation order.

Alkurdi said he can hear Israeli forces from the apartment where he’s sheltering as they “erase the area completely,” referring to the eastern Zeitoun neighborhood.

Zeitoun was once Gaza City’s largest neighborhood, filled with markets, schools and clinics. Over the last month, large swaths of it and the neighboring area of Sabra have been flattened, according to satellite photos reviewed by The Associated Press from early August and early September. The photos show that entire blocks have been pummeled or bulldozed into empty, sandy lots.

“It’s not something partial like before. It’s 100%,” he said. “The house, I’m telling my friends, it keeps dancing all the day. It keeps dancing, going right and left like an earthquake.”

Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGO network, left his home in the upscale Rimal neighborhood in the early days of the war and also returned there with his family in January. He, like Alkurdi, said his family would likely leave Gaza City if their area receives an evacuation order.

But leaving this time would be different, he said. “Gaza will be leveled and destroyed. Last time, I had my car. There was fuel. Everyone had his income, his money.”

Back then, the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis still stood in southern Gaza.

Now, after months of bombardment, “there is no Rafah. Almost no Khan Younis,” Shawa said. The displaced are instead being directed to refugee camps in central Gaza and al-Mawasi, an area in Gaza’s southwest with little infrastructure that is already crowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans.

Anas Arafat, another Rimal resident, insisted he was staying put. “There is no safe place in Gaza — the army can bomb anywhere,” he explained over WhatsApp.

The IDF claimed on Wednesday that Hamas was blocking Gazans from leaving to keep the city stocked with human shields, releasing a recording of a Gazan man saying the terror group was sending fleeing residents back.

“The Hamas terror organization is doing everything it can to block the population’s movement south to use civilians as human shields and for propaganda purposes,” an Israeli security official said. “In practice, the public’s barrier of fear has been broken, and tens of thousands of residents have managed to bypass Hamas checkpoints and evacuate the city.”

But Mo’in Hilu, who returned to Rimal after fleeing Gaza City in October 2023, said many of his neighbors were planning on staying of their own volition, hoping the invasion plan might be canceled. He was torn on whether to flee, recalling the year he and his family spent in tents with no electricity or running water, continuously having to move from place to place across southern Gaza.

“It was very hard,” he said. “When I came back to the city, I told myself, ‘If they tell me to leave again, I will not leave Gaza City again.'”

For some — medical workers, older and sick people — leaving Gaza City is nearly impossible even if they wanted to leave.

“The elders, they’re saying we will die here,” Shawa said. “This has pushed the other members of the family to stay, not to leave.”

“My aunt is elderly and can’t walk, and my mother also struggles with mobility. We have so many belongings and no way to manage them. It feels unthinkable,” said Norhan Almuzaini, medical program officer in northern Gaza for the group Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Asil Abu Ras, head of the Occupied Territories Department at Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, said half of the hospitals still operating at some capacity in the Strip were in Gaza City, with no feasible way to move them all south.

“We’re talking about people on ventilators, patients who need dialysis or cancer treatment, and newborns in intensive care units — there are at least 100 premature babies in incubators in Gaza City,” she said.

In a recording published by the army last month, an officer can be heard telling a Gazan health official to plan for medical evacuations south, only to be told that the south has no facilities able to absorb them, according to the World Health Organization and Médecins Sans Frontières.

“The main thing is that you have a plan to move the equipment. Where to? You’ll have space, for sure. We are going to give you space,” the officer replies.

Abu Ras noted that the published excerpt of the conversation made no mention of the patients themselves — only of equipment.

“Even in normal circumstances, outside of war, relocating, say, 20,000 patients from hospitals in northern Israel to central Israel would take months to plan — if it’s possible at all. Add to that a place like Gaza, which has been at war for nearly two years, and it’s simply impossible,” she said. “If we’ve learned anything over the past two years, it’s that Israel won’t have a plan. Evacuation is a death sentence for doctors, for patients, and also for displaced people who sometimes try to shelter inside hospitals.”

Amal Seyam is the general director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. Originally from the Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, her home was destroyed by bombardment. For nearly four months, she has been sheltering in the Nasr neighborhood in the city’s west, where she stays alongside her colleagues inside the women’s center.

Seyam has been displaced five times since the war began — three times within the city and twice to the south, in Rafah and Khan Younis. Each time, she fled with nothing.

When asked if she would consider leaving Gaza City, she said: “I will only leave when everyone who needs me here leaves. As long as there’s a woman who needs me, I am staying. All of Gaza feels like it’s in the red zone now anyway. The bombing is happening meters from us, not kilometers.”

She paused, her voice breaking into tears.

“Many people have started packing. Many have already left. Do you know what displacement means? It means moving once again, building your life once again, buying new things, blankets, tents, all over again.”

Those who have left Gaza City over the past few months have found dire conditions elsewhere in Gaza. Their arrival has crowded already overflowing tent camps and sent prices of basic goods up.

On August 27, IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee said there were 19 empty zones available in the south, in both the central refugee camps and Al-Mawasi. However, much of that land is unfit for habitation and areas where people can set up tents are already overcrowded, Cherevko said.

“The empty places in the south of the Strip are basically under evacuation orders,” she said. “In the Al-Mawasi area, the tents stretch all the way to the waterline, and whenever the tide rises even slightly, more tents are destroyed.”

Iman El-Naya, from Khan Younis, fled Gaza City three months ago. “The beach is crowded. Everywhere is crowded. There’s no hygiene. It’s a struggle to get water and food.”

“I go and stand in line for water. Getting bread is a struggle. Everything is even more expensive after the people from the north came here.”

On August 28, Israel announced the launch of a new water line from Egypt to Al-Mawasi, funded by the United Arab Emirates. The pipeline is expected to provide 15 liters of water per person per day — the UN’s recommended minimum for drinking, bathing, and cooking. Yet it remains unclear whether the calculation accounts for the potential influx of Gaza City residents.

Shorouk Abu Eid, a pregnant woman from Gaza City, was displaced to Khan Younis four months ago. She said the arrival of more people from the north is creating an even more tragic situation.

“There is no privacy, no peace of mind. Places I used to walk to in five or 10 minutes are taking me around an hour now because of the congestion. There’s barely 10 centimeters between tents,” she said.

Jamal Abu Reily lamented that the bathrooms are overflowing and that there’s so little room for new arrivals.

“How are we going to all fit here? he asked. ”Where are they going to stay? In the sea?”