For 700 days, Izz al-Din Shihab and his family managed to largely stay put in Gaza City.

Originally from Jabaliya, a Gaza City suburb that was an early focus of fighting when it erupted in 2023, the doctor and his family moved to a rented apartment in a different part of the city, and had remained there, through bombardments, street battles and food shortages.

But when the army began telling people last month to leave the city ahead of a large ground operation, “there was a big argument at home — should we go, and where,” Shihab told The Times of Israel by phone. ” We always stayed north of Wadi Gaza.”

On September 2, Shihab and his family joined those heeding the army’s call, making their way south, to central Gaza’s al-Maghazi refugee camp.

“Now the six of us — me, my parents and my brother’s family, are in a tiny studio apartment we rented in the central Strip,” he said.

According to the Israeli military, as of Tuesday, when it launched a long-threatened major offensive in the city, 370,000 of the city’s residents had left. That number is less than half of the approximately 1 million Palestinians that the Israel Defense Forces had ordered to evacuate — the entire city — but even that amount has seemingly overwhelmed demand for shelter and transportation out of northern Gaza.

With tents in short supply, to say nothing of places to pitch them, Gazans leaving the city say they are being squeezed for thousands to pay for shelter or a vehicle to move their belongings there. Many without such means fear leaving the city only to find themselves stranded without shelter and still in danger, their apprehensions bolstered by unconfirmed accounts of some who fled south returning to the city after failing to find alternative solutions elsewhere, even as fighting intensifies.

“A million people are being told to go south and they need tents, but tents aren’t coming in — and if they do, they get stolen,” said Karim Joudeh, a Gaza City resident who left for the central Strip with his parents and sister on September 7. “There’s no land in the south, no apartments to rent. You’re asking people to leave Gaza City into the unknown, with no horizon.”

Shihab, like others, paid a heavy price in order to move south and to stay there, shelling out premiums to secure fuel and a place to stay, both in short supply.

“I paid NIS 1,500 [$450] to move our things by car to the central Strip. To go further south costs another NIS 1,000 [$300],” he said, noting that the army had recommended displaced Gazans go to an area west of Khan Younis designated for sheltering the displaced.

“But there’s no space there,” Shihab said, adding that the road was jammed with people when he left.

Though he left Gaza City two weeks ago, the road was already jammed with others fleeing like him.

“The displacement route was packed,” he said.

While the doctor was able to find an apartment to rent, he would have also paid dearly for a tent, which Gazans say are not being distributed free by aid groups but instead must be acquired from merchants who charge steep fees.

“My colleagues, doctors, told me that renting a tent costs NIS 4,000 [$1,200] and renting a car costs 1,500. People have no income, they can’t afford it,” Shihab said.

According to figures released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on September 10, moving from one part of the Strip to another can cost up to NIS 4,000 for transportation alone. Families with special needs can pay as much as NIS 5,600 ($1,700).

“For those considering moving, the related costs alone constitute a significant deterrent,” the UNOCHA report read.

It noted that living space in displacement sites averaged 0.5 square meters (5.4 square feet) per person, well below the global standard of 3.5 square meters (37.7 square feet).

“You come [to the central Strip] and they demand NIS 2,000 [$600] a month even for the smallest storage space,” Joudeh said. “Even just for land to put up a tent, they want money.”

COGAT, the Israeli body coordinating aid deliveries to Gaza, announced on September 14 that 15 dunams (about 3.7 acres) of land in Khan Younis’s Hamad neighborhood had been cleared of rubble by international teams to help accommodate displaced residents moving from the north.

But finding tents to place there may be a whole other issue.

In August, the Palestine Shelter Cluster, which operates under the UN to monitor housing needs for Palestinians, estimated that 1.4 million Gazans were in need of emergency shelter, necessitating the entry of 3,500 trucks-worth of shelter items alone.

“The shelter situation is catastrophic,” the group said in a report, noting that 86,000 tents were waiting to be sent into Gaza.

With hunger concerns in the Strip paramount, most aid entering Gaza in recent months has consisted of food. On September 3, the Cluster reported that only 208 tents had entered the Strip since August 16, though hundreds more had been slated to enter a day earlier.

On September 4, COGAT said that thousands of tents and shelter items entered Gaza that day and that tens of thousands more were due to arrive “in the coming days” to meet demand from displaced families. On September 15, in response to The Times of Israel’s inquiry, COGAT said that around 14,000 tents have entered the Gaza Strip over the past two weeks.

A small survey conducted in Gaza in mid-August by French crisis management NGO Acted found that most respondents were planning to leave once ordered to evacuate, but recorded rampant concerns regarding how they would secure transportation, or if they would have the necessary funds.

Most respondents indicated they did not know where they would go and expressed worries about a lack of information about what routes were safe and where they could find space, shelter, water and other necessities.

Abdallah, a 32-year-old Gaza City resident who asked not to use his full name due to safety concerns, said he was considering leaving, “but I don’t have the means.”

“It’s too expensive. The cost to travel from here to Deir al-Balah [in the central Strip] is NIS 5,000 [$1,500] for a car. Renting a tent also costs NIS 5,000, which I don’t have. I’m waiting. Someone from a charity promised me a tent in the coming days, but nothing has arrived yet.”

For Abdallah, the high cost is not the only deterrent. He fears that he is in danger of IDF airstrikes no matter where he goes, because Hamas remains embedded in civilian areas.

“For me, displacement is the last resort. Why? If I move from northern Gaza to the south, there’s Hamas here and there’s Hamas there. Even in the so-called humanitarian zones, everything is under Hamas control — and Israel bombs those places. So the danger is both here and there,” he said.

“If there were truly humanitarian areas, they would be under Israeli army protection, or monitored zones where people were checked — those would be safe. But I have many neighbors who went to these ‘humanitarian zones,’ and they were bombed,” Abdallah said.

Israel on Tuesday launched a controversial offensive aimed at conquering Gaza City and dismantling what Jerusalem says is one of the last redoubts of the Hamas terror group.

The operation kicked off with an intense overnight bombing campaign that could be heard as far away as Tel Aviv, with ground troops later advancing on the Strip’s largest city.

In the coming days and weeks, ground troops were set to push deeper into the city and encircle it as part of efforts to defeat Hamas’s forces there, according to the IDF.

The military has estimated that there are thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza City, as well as several hostages abducted from Israel during the October 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war.

“Gaza [City] is burning. The IDF is striking the terror infrastructure with an iron fist,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said Tuesday, announcing the start of the offensive.

The push came after several weeks in which the IDF repeatedly told Gazans to evacuate, including dropping leaflets over the city. Few heeded the call at first, but the pace had picked up as the campaign neared and Israel began toppling Gaza City high-rises in preparation, according to the army.

IDF estimates from Tuesday morning indicated that more than 370,000 Palestinians had evacuated Gaza City, though a UN estimate issued earlier in the day said around 220,000 Palestinians had fled northern Gaza over the past month.

Israel had claimed that many Gazans who wanted to leave the city were prevented from doing so by Hamas, which wanted to keep civilians as human shields.

In recent days, media outlets affiliated with Hamas have published reports encouraging people to remain in Gaza City — including video interviews with residents vowing never to leave.

But Shihab said no one stopped him from leaving.

“No one tried to prevent us from going south. There are voices on Facebook saying, ‘Don’t leave,’ but people understand well today who is behind those voices,” he said.

Joudeh also said there were calls to stay in Gaza, but no actual obstruction.

“No one stopped me from leaving, but there are calls like, ‘Stay strong, stay on your land.’ Everyone makes their own decision whether to leave or not,” he said.

There have also been reports of people who reach the southern Strip being blocked from erecting tents.

Recently, a video circulating on social media showed a Gaza resident north of Khan Younis, near the Hamad housing complex, claiming he was prevented from setting up a tent there. He said shots were fired at him when he tried. From the video, it is unclear who stopped him. On social media, some said the obstruction came from individuals acting on their own.

Abdallah said a neighbor who tried to leave Gaza City and set up a tent in the same area was forced to return after being stopped. He alleged Hamas members prevented displaced people from pitching tents by claiming the land was “government property” reserved for use by Hamas-led authorities.

Anas Arafat, a Gaza City resident still living in the city’s west, told The Times of Israel that around 30 families near him had left in recent days, but five or six had already returned after failing to find shelter in the south.

Olga Chervko, a spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office currently in Deir al-Balah, told reporters on September 12 that many people who recently moved south had already gone back to Gaza City due to lack of space. She did not give exact numbers but said, “The numbers [for those moving south] are very fluid. People go down and then up, trying basically to find a place to live.”

Like many others who fled Gaza City at the start of the war, Joudeh had just returned in early 2025, but opted to leave again once the bombardments began intensifying.

“We decided to leave because of the airstrikes, the danger. If you leave at the last minute, you can’t take anything. But if you leave calmly, you can bring what you need, belongings from your home,” he said.

Like Shihab, he did not attempt to go all the way to the south, instead finding a place to stay in central Gaza.

He described the situation there as calmer than in Gaza City. There is some water piped into houses once a week from Israel’s Mekorot company, and relatively more food, he said.

For Shihab, leaving Gaza City was a last resort, one he had managed to put off for nearly two years. But, he explained, “staying in the north means death.”

“Why did we leave after 700 days? The last time we stayed, we paid the price — we died of hunger in the north, there was no food, and we lost many relatives,” he said. “What’s the future? We don’t know. No one represents us in Gaza. We don’t want conflict, we don’t want killing — we just want to live.”