PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES, Nov 18 — Airstrikes, destroyed houses and loved ones annihilated by bombs: Palestinians who fled the north of the Gaza Strip on Israeli orders have found no trace of the safety promised to them.

Nada Abu Hiya is eight years old and suffered her third bombing of the war at the Nuseirat refugee camp yesterday.

"First they bombed my grandfather’s house where we lived” in Gaza City, she told AFP. "Then we went to Deir el-Balah, where we were bombed again.

"So we came here and they bombed us again.”

At dawn yesterday an Israeli plane bombed the Nuseirat camp, in the central Gaza Strip, killing 18 people according to health officials in the Hamas-run government.

"There are bombings everywhere,” said Nada. "My grandmother is dead, my mother is dead, my grandfather is dead, my uncle is dead, they destroyed our house. Our neighbours’ house is also destroyed and they are all dead.”

The child is among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled Gaza City and other parts of the north in recent weeks after Israeli forces ordered residents to move south as they wage a military offensive to oust the territory’s Hamas rulers.

In all, more than 1.5 million people have been displaced in Gaza, nearly two-thirds of the territory’s population, according to the United Nations.

Israel has vowed to "crush” Hamas in response to the group’s October 7 attack, when it broke through Gaza’s militarised border to kill about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and take around 240 hostage, according to Israeli officials.

The army’s air and ground campaign has killed 12,000 people, including 5,000 children, according to Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007.

‘I’m your mother’

The victims of yesterday's bombing at Nuseirat included seven of Azhar al-Rifi’s relatives, three of them children.

It was the second time that her family had been bombed.

Rifi, 36, first fled the north to stay with relatives in Deir el-Balah, only for their house to be destroyed. She then sought refuge at the Nuseirat camp.

Rifi was admitted to hospital in Deir al-Balah with leg injuries, while her two-year-old son Mohammed survived with a head injury.

"They said the south was safer, so we moved,” she said.

But her five-year-old nephew Joud was killed.

"Two weeks ago, his mother died, so my husband decided that he would live with us,” she said.

"He arrived last night and said to me: ‘Now that my mother is dead, I can no longer call anyone mom’.

"I replied: ‘I’m your mother’.”

The boy went to sleep in a room with 12 other children, she said.

"At four in the morning he was taken away from us.” — AFP