– There, there! cried a little boy, pointing up to the sky.

Seconds later, as people run screaming for cover, a rocket comes into view and hits the ground with a massive explosion.

The target is an unidentified structure among canvas tents in al Mawasi, the same designated humanitarian area where Israeli the army orders the people to leave.

Asked by Sky News, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not say why the location was targeted on Wednesday morning.

Mawasi is a huge mass of displacement, with more than a million Gazans living in tents, temporary shelters or in the open, forcibly evicted from their homes elsewhere in the Strip, often multiple times.

“We don’t know where to go. Seriously,” says one woman. “There’s no safe place to go anymore.

“No safe place, so we don’t know, seriously, we have nothing. We’re losing everything we have.”

Hits without explanation and helps with chaos

The number in the camp is increasing daily as Israel’s military operation in the north aerate continue.

However, despite IDF orders to move south, up to 75,000 people remain in the north, some trapped, others unable or unwilling to move.

More than 1,000 Gazans have been killed in the area since the operation began on October 5, according to UN figures, many of them by rocket fire on residential buildings or temporary camps.

The IDF has given very few details about this operation and its objectives, other than to say that it is undertaking the regrouping Hamas fighters.

Unlike in the early months of the war, the IDF has released almost no evidence to support strikes on alleged Hamas targets in northern Gaza.

Rescuers and doctors say they are being denied access to many parts of the north. Stray dogs and cats eat corpses abandoned on the streets.

Aid organizations say they are regularly prevented from accessing the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia.

The IDF accuses Hamas and armed gangs of hijacking aid convoys and stealing aid to sell at inflated prices. Drone footage proves this is happening. Much of Gaza is now lawless.

During a recent Israeli military buildup, some Gazans leaving the north told an Israeli television journalist that they blamed Hamas for the conditions.

“Hamas injured and killed me,” a woman tells the journalist. “May God resolve the situation with Hamas,” says another. Israeli soldiers stand nearby.

Read more:
Hamas is ready for a ceasefire “immediately”, the official told Sky News
How a surgeon died in Israeli prison after being taken from Gaza

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In October, a spokesman for COGAT, the Israeli civil-military border authority that coordinates humanitarian supplies, said aid deliveries were not needed in the northern cities because there was “no population left”.

Testimony from several organizations at the scene and footage filmed for Sky News suggests otherwise.

“Living conditions in Gaza are not fit for human survival,” Joyce Msuya, a senior UN aid coordinator, told the UN Security Council recently.

“The daily cruelty we see in Gaza seems to know no bounds.”

“The General’s Plan”

A former head of Israel’s National Security Council has drawn up a proposal to put northern Gaza under siege with the aim of starving Hamas into surrender.

“The entire Gaza Strip should be closed and Israel should prevent any supply from entering Gaza,” retired General Giora Eiland told Sky News.

Eiland’s proposal, which is known as the General’s Plan, became notorious.

It has been shown to senior IDF commanders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, but Eiland says no action is being taken.

Many observers disagree, saying that the IDF’s actions in northern Gaza now bear striking similarities to the controversial General’s Plan.

He said: “I would let everyone go, even the Hamas fighters, but after two weeks I would do one simple thing: I would stop the supply of fuel, food and other important materials to this part of northern Gaza… this it is the most effective way to conquer northern Gaza.”

Eiland suggests that aid agencies and NGOs help evacuate civilians from the combat zone; is an unrealistic proposition, as aid organizations would refuse on the grounds that it would make them complicit in the IDF’s actions.

The Israeli government denies there are plans to permanently reoccupy northern Gaza, but a series of comments by senior officials in recent weeks suggest otherwise, and bulldozers are systematically tearing down the ruins of many buildings that remain standing.

An Israeli general was recorded in early November as telling journalists that “there is no intention to allow residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.” The IDF press office claimed that his words were taken out of context.

Haaretz, a major Israeli newspaper, recently published an editorial accusing the IDF of ethnic cleansing in the north.

One of his correspondents reported: “The area looks like it has been hit by a natural disaster.”

The recently fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the families of the hostages that “there is nothing left to do in Gaza.”

“Major achievements have been made,” he added, but efforts to promote a ceasefire have stalled and there is no sign of a truce in the near term.