Israel-Hamas war: In Gaza, there is nowhere to run or hide as invasion and bombing campaign splits area in two

We watched the latest feed of pictures and interviews sent to us in southern Israel by our Sky News colleagues in Gaza.

We are only a few miles apart but we could be on different continents.

The Sky News team and other journalists who live in Gaza are our eyes and ears to what is happening there.

Their work is dangerous, and vital to all of us who want to know what is happening.

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Like them we know what it’s like to work in dangerous places; unlike them, we aren’t doing our job with our mothers, fathers, partners, children, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters living alongside us.

But they do it every day to bear witness.

What their latest feed shows is Gaza being split in two.

Only two roads connect the north and the south of the Gaza Strip; one is a main road, the other is a smaller coastal road.

Both are impossible to drive down with any safety anymore.

In a series of interviews, the Sky team spoke to some of the last people to make it south from Gaza City.

Their stories are uniformly terrifying and almost all the same – attacked as they drove, cars in front of them destroyed, and bodies strewn across the road.

‘Everywhere is being bombed’

With a mattress strapped to the top of his car, and his children by his side, Abdul Nasr Lajkar told Sky News he doesn’t know where to go.

“It doesn’t matter if you are in Gaza or Khan Younis or anywhere else. There is no safe place. There is no place that is immune from bombing,” he said.

“Gaza is being bombed, Nuseirat is being bombed, Khan Younis is being bombed. Everywhere is being bombed. That is why we are sitting on the street.”

He then recounted the story of his dangerous and almost tragic trip to the city of Khan Younis.

“We saw a lot of destruction, they hit a car in front of us and we saw legs and hands on top of the car, and it was the car immediately in front of us,” he said.

“They all became like when you slaughter an animal, how you cut them up into pieces – that’s what happened to the occupants of the car.

“We got out of our car, and we could not comprehend what we were seeing.”

The windscreen of his car was damaged in the blast.

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‘Nobody was alive’

Another evacuee, 30-year-old Hassan Abu Abdien, had a very similar experience on his drive south.

“We were moving and we passed that area and they hit the car in front, we were 40 to 50 metres away from them, and I pulled the handbrake and turned around but the shrapnel hit my windscreen,” he told Sky News.

“There were no ambulances or emergency services to help those casualties there, all of them got killed – kids, youngsters, they all got martyred – nobody was alive.”

A Gazan journalist, Yusuf Al Saifi, actually filmed his and his colleague’s terrifying experience on the main road south.

He told Sky News he has been travelling north daily to cover the Israeli advance on Gaza, and then returning south, but on his latest trip, he realised everything had changed on the route – an Israeli tank is in control and he says it is showing no mercy.

He filmed the moment a family car drove on the road towards the tank, not realising it was there.

“The car that was moving forward didn’t realise there was a tank there, he kept moving forward quickly and realised there was a tank in front of him,” he said.

He continued: “They fired on him, the driver tried turning back.

“He had a family with him, I saw the family in the car… they struck him with a shell, and they died.

“We saw it with our own eyes.”

Sky News has reached out to the IDF for comment on this incident, but we are yet to receive a reply.

‘Israel went to plan B’

As the Israeli campaign continues, it is starting to become clear the military wants to cut Gaza in half so it can concentrate its operations on Hamas strongholds in the north; an attempt to dismantle its network of tunnels and ultimately the organisation itself.

Palestinian political leaders like Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told me this was always the plan.

He believes it is not just a military decision but a deep-rooted strategy to literally redraw the map of the Middle East.

“I think Israel went to plan B, which is to ethnically cleanse Gaza City and the north of Gaza completely, and cut it off,” he told me.

“That is exactly what they are doing and what they will be trying to do through their ground operation.”

This is a proper invasion and bombing campaign that appears to be growing by the day.

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The Israeli military is determined to succeed, and Hamas and its militias are determined to fight.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says there will be no ceasefire and there will be no let up.

Which means for the civilians trapped in Gaza, there really is nowhere to run or to hide.