A new estimate from the United Nations revealed that nearly 180,000 Palestinians have been displaced in just 10 days by Israel’s intensified military campaign in Gaza. The figure, released Tuesday by the International Organization for Migration’s Global Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) Cluster, underscores the escalating humanitarian catastrophe as the Israeli military proceeds with Operation Gideon’s Chariots—a renewed assault that has devastated what little remained of Gaza’s fragile infrastructure.
The CCCM report warned that “direct attacks on shelters for displaced people have become common,” and added that the latest phase of the Israeli offensive has undone months of fragile recovery. “Since the collapse of the cease-fire on 18 March, nearly 616,000 people have been displaced—multiple times, some as many as 10,” the report said. “During the cease-fire, over half a million people went back to their homes, mostly in the north, to try to rebuild their lives. That fragile progress has now been reversed, as intensified military operations are once again displacing families away from the areas they had only recently returned to.”
An estimated 80% of Gaza is now either under displacement orders or marked as a “no-go” zone, according to humanitarian partners on the ground cited by CCCM. “My sibling died in a ‘safe’ zone after they bombed it,” one Palestinian aid worker told the organization. “They call places safe, then attack them. I’d rather stay home with my family and face whatever comes, at least we all die together, rather than be separated.”
Nowhere has the danger been clearer than in Gaza City, where Israeli forces bombed the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School on Monday, killing at least 36 people sheltering inside. The Gaza Government Media Office (GMO) reported that 18 children died in what it called a “brutal massacre.” Once considered a safe haven, the school became the latest target in a series of attacks on designated shelters.
“The school was supposed to be a place of safety. Instead, it was turned into an inferno,” said Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal. “We heard desperate cries for help from people trapped alive inside the blaze, but the fire was too intense. We couldn’t get to them.”
Among the survivors was 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil, seen on video moving through the flames in a daze. Paramedic Hussein Muhaysin, who rescued her, said the girl “was moments away from death.” He added, “When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened. We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing.” According to Muhaysin, “Only her father survived, and he is now in critical condition.” He continued, “We see tragedy every day, but holding a child who has lost everything, who doesn’t even know yet, that’s a kind of pain no one can explain.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed responsibility for the bombing, saying it targeted “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center,” but provided no evidence to support the assertion. It was one of 200 strikes carried out by the IDF that day alone.
In northern Gaza’s Jabalia, a separate Israeli airstrike killed 19 members of the Abdel Rabbo family, most of them women and children. Eyewitness Moumen Abdel Rabbo said, “It was sudden. The house was completely flattened. Ambulances barely made it through to recover the wounded and the dead. Some bodies are still trapped under the rubble.” He added, “How can we search for survivors under fire? These were civilians; mothers, toddlers, elderly people. This wasn’t a military target. It was our home.”
More than 2,200 Palestinian families have been entirely wiped out since October 2023, according to the GMO.
Even as bombings continue, aid access remains severely limited. A new privately coordinated relief scheme in Gaza—launched by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has links to both the U.S. and Israeli governments—has drawn sharp criticism from international observers. CCCM warned that “these arrangements risk circumventing established humanitarian coordination mechanisms, undermining humanitarian principles, and putting civilians at further risk by promoting displacement without essential protection or adequate access to lifesaving services.”
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor echoed this concern, stating, “All available information about the new Israeli mechanism clearly indicates that it is designed as a tool of coercive control over the Gaza Strip’s civilian population.” The group added, “It limits families to just one aid parcel per week under highly restrictive security conditions, thus violating the principles of non-discrimination, adequacy, and continuity in humanitarian aid. Such limited distribution is not a genuine humanitarian response, but a deliberate policy aimed at barely managing hunger, rather than actually alleviating it.”
On Sunday, Jake Wood, the head of the U.S.- and Israel-backed group established to distribute this aid, resigned. He cited concerns that the mission could violate “basic humanitarian principles.”
According to officials, only 100 of the 46,200 humanitarian aid trucks scheduled to enter Gaza over the past 84 days have actually made it in. Hamas released a statement Sunday accusing Israel of weaponizing starvation. “The occupation orchestrates the crime of starvation in Gaza and uses it as a tool to establish a political and field reality, under the cover of misleading relief projects that have been rejected by the United Nations and international organizations, due to lack of transparency and minimal humanitarian standards.”
The ongoing assault comes as the International Court of Justice continues to weigh South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. The case cites Israel’s complete siege of Gaza—including the restriction of food, water, and medical supplies—as evidence of genocidal intent.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who oversaw the 2008–09 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, recently issued a rare and scathing condemnation of the current war. “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians,” Olmert wrote. “We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit—but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly.”
Meanwhile, cease-fire negotiations remain in limbo. The Trump administration on Monday denied reports that Hamas had accepted a 70-day truce agreement proposed by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Although Witkoff initially told CNN that “the deal is on the table” and that “Israel will agree” to it, he later walked back his remarks. An unnamed Palestinian official told The Times of Israel that Witkoff changed his mind. Witkoff claimed Hamas responded in an “unacceptable” way to a proposal he ultimately said he never formally made.
CAIR, the U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned the bombing of the school shelter and the previous day’s killing of two Red Cross workers in Khan Younis, along with the March 23 massacre of 15 Palestinian first responders. “How many more children, women, the elderly, journalists, healthcare workers, and first responders must Benjamin Netanyahu slaughter with American weapons before Donald Trump forces him to accept a permanent cease-fire deal that ends the genocide for good and frees all captives?” said CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad. “Every hour that Israel’s genocidal crimes continue with impunity—and with our government’s complicity—adds more dishonor to a shameful period in the history of our nation and the world.”
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 190,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded since the assault began in October 2023. That includes at least 14,000 who are missing and believed to be buried beneath the rubble. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet earlier this year found that Gaza’s reported death toll is likely under counted by at least 41 percent.
As the bombs fall and the aid fails to arrive, Gaza’s people continue to endure relentless loss—with nowhere left to go, and no one left to count on.
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