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GAZA CITY — The line of desperate Palestinian civilians stretched for hundreds of yards along Salah al-Din Road on Sunday as they moved away from the shattering violence toward what they must hope will be a safer place in southern Gaza.

It was dead quiet as the line stopped and started. The only sound was occasional shellfire in the distance. Every 50 feet or so, you could see someone with a white flag. People trudged forward with sacks containing whatever they could carry from their homes. I counted five wheelchairs. I saw one bed on wheels bearing someone too young or infirm to walk.

This was a glimpse of the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/09/israel-humanitarian-pauses-gaza/" target=_blank>humanitarian corridor</a>” that Israel, under increasing international pressure, has established to allow Palestinians to flee northern Gaza to safer ground — so that the Israel Defense Forces can intensify its assault on Hamas strongholds with less risk to civilians. The IDF allowed me and three other journalists to travel with Israeli soldiers here to see this flight from the battle zone.

In the 30 minutes we were able to watch, we estimated that at least 1,000 Palestinians walked past <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/09/israel-gaza-war-civilians-evacuation/" target=_blank>along Salah al-Din Road</a>. An IDF spokesman said on Saturday about 50,000 people used several corridors. The number Sunday was probably similar.

We were kept behind an Israeli bunker, manned by soldiers with automatic weapons, so we could not interview any of the Gazan civilians. Lt. Col. Gilad Pasternak, deputy commander of the brigade deployed here, said the troops were there to protect against a possible attack by Hamas fighters who wanted to stop civilians from leaving. About 15 minutes after we left the site, Gilad said, there was a “purple fire” alert on his radio, warning that Hamas had shot mortar rounds at that sector. It was impossible to verify the report.

One can only imagine what the people in the silent line of escapees have experienced during the past five weeks of war. Hamas is everywhere in northern Gaza, and Israel ravaged civilian neighborhoods while it attacked. Almost every building in the area of Gaza City we saw seemed to have been damaged by bombing or shellfire.

This war has produced deeply horrifying images: Israeli children assaulted in barbaric ways by Hamas terrorists; Palestinian children left to die under Israeli bombardment. It’s a war in which we’ve all looked into the abyss.

As the line moved slowly forward, Pasternak raised a bullhorn and called out a message to the line of people, perhaps 100 yards away, in Hebrew and then in English: “If there is inside the convoy any Israeli, run toward the soldiers. Do not be afraid. If they [Hamas] fire at you, lie on the ground.” Pasternak said he and his IDF colleagues have repeated this appeal the past two days to every line of refugees, hoping a hostage may hear it. So far, no success.

I told Pasternak that watching this line of frightened people, I was reminded of the most painful images of war. “It’s heartbreaking for us, too,” he said. “But it’s fighting for our existence. It’s being or not being.” Every Israeli soldier I talked to inside Gaza, and nearly every soldier and civilian I’ve met in Tel Aviv, has said a version of the same thing.

We came to Gaza City from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/11/israel-hamas-war-beeri-kibbutz/" target=_blank>the Israeli kibbutz called Be’eri</a>, the scene of some of the most grisly acts of terrorism by Hamas against Israeli civilians. We passed cars abandoned by Israelis who had been killed or taken hostage. We saw houses that had been scarred by mortar fire. Those images from Oct. 7 are seared into every Israeli’s mind as though they happened an instant ago.

“I understood at that moment that the Hamas attack was something we had never feared or expected,” Pasternak said. “The amount of death, the torture, the monstrosities were something that we never imagined.”

We traveled into Gaza in an Israeli armored personnel carrier, along the same road that the Hamas militants used when it assaulted Be’eri. That road passes some Palestinian villages that are mostly rubble. In Juhor ad Dik, which Pasternak said was an assembly point for Hamas’s burst through the fence, nearly every building had been damaged or destroyed.

Pasternak showed us video of a tunnel about 50 yards from the local school that Hamas had used to stage attacks. The tunnel wasn’t safe to visit, he said. Hamas fighters had emerged from a tunnel in the area a day before and opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades. The school is a skeleton of cratered walls and metal frames. Pasternak said civilians had fled before Israeli bombing began.

This conflict has raised excruciating issues that I can’t begin to resolve. But here’s what it looked like on the ground Sunday: Israeli soldiers along Salah al-Din Road were trying, they said, to protect a mass of Palestinian refugees fleeing violence inflicted by Israel. An observer could only hope the line was moving toward safety rather than more death and destruction.

2018 Finalist team, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

2018 George Polk Award

2010 Urbino International Press Award

2013 Overseas Press Club Award for Foreign Affairs Commentary

Lifetime Achievement Award, International Committee for Foreign Journalists

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2004 Edward Weintal Prize

2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary

As The Post’s foreign editor, Ignatius supervised the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

The Paladin

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Body of Lies

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Agents of Innocence

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David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin.” 

David Ignatius

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Gaza City humanitarian corridor betrays a silent desperation

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Palestinians continue to evacuate to the southern Gaza Strip, Bureij Gaza Strip - 11 Nov 2023

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