Israel renewed calls for some 1 million Gaza residents to move south, while Hamas urged people to stay in their homes.
Palestinians scrambled to flee northern Gaza on Saturday after the Israeli military ordered nearly half the population to evacuate south and carried out limited ground forays ahead of an expected land offensive a week after Hamas' bloody, wide-ranging attack into Israel.
Thousands of people crammed into a U.N.-run school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah, a farming town south of the evacuation zone. Many slept outside on the ground without mattresses, or in chairs pulled from classrooms. Fearing a mass exodus of Palestinians, Egyptian authorities erected"temporary" blast walls on Egypt's side of the heavily-guarded Rafah crossing, which has been closed for days because of Israeli airstrikes, two Egyptian officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
Palestinian families in Gaza faced agonizing dilemmas in deciding whether to leave or stay. Israeli strikes have leveled entire city blocks. A siege declared earlier in the week sealed off food, water and medical supplies, and the territory was under a near-total power blackout. Josep Borrell welcomed the evacuation order but said,"You cannot move such a volume of people in short period of time," noting a lack of shelters and transportation.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said many people were relying on dirty water from wells as desalination plants shut down for lack of fuel.
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