In a windowless control room at a military base in southern Israel, five soldiers monitored the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans on a huge computer screen.
The screen showed a live map of northern Gaza, the densely populated area of about 1.1 million residents who were told on Friday by the Israeli military to head south for their own safety. Using data collected primarily from more than a million mobile phones, the map provided soldiers with a real-time assessment of how many Gazans had heeded Israel’s demand.
The Israel Defense Forces have telegraphed for days that they will soon begin a ground operation in northern Gaza to topple Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that controls Gaza and orchestrated the worst terrorist attacks in Israel’s history on October 7, killing more than 1,400 people and kidnapping at least another 199 people. Israeli counterattacks have killed more than 2,800 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.
The Israeli military allowed a New York Times reporter to see the data-tracking system, hoping to show that it was doing everything it could to reduce harm to civilians, even as its warplanes killed hundreds more Palestinians. on Monday, including in southern Gaza, where civilians had been told to take shelter.
Some neighborhoods were painted white and red on the screen, suggesting that they still housed the majority of their residents. But an increasing number of areas were turning green and yellow, indicating that most of their residents had left.
“It’s not a 100 percent perfect system, but it gives you the information you need to make a decision,” said Brig. General Udi Ben Muha, who oversees the monitoring process. “The colors say what can and cannot be done,” said General Ben Muha.
While political leaders had yet to give final approval to a ground operation, the Israeli military was stuck in a holding pattern on Monday. On Monday night, his troops remained concentrated on the Gaza border, but had not yet managed to cross it. The army was watching how many civilians had left northern Gaza.
It was also providing last-minute training and equipment to the hundreds of thousands of military reservists who had been called up for the war effort. And the few extra days have given diplomats time to conduct last-minute – and, so far, fruitless – negotiations over opening Gaza’s border with Egypt to evacuees and aid convoys.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, also invited President Biden to visit Israel this week, and the military was unlikely to complicate his visit by launching an invasion while he was on Israeli soil, analysts said.
“The ground operation is going to have a lot of casualties on both sides,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior military officer and director of the International Counterterrorism Institute at Reichman University in Israel.
“You don’t want to do that when the president of the United States is here,” he added.
Meanwhile, three senior Israeli commanders said they were seizing every moment to prepare reservists for the ground war. The expected operation will be the first in almost 15 years in which Israel will attempt to capture and hold land for an extended period. Many full-time soldiers have never carried out such an operation, let alone the 360,000 reservists called up from their day jobs since the Hamas attacks.
A significant minority of infantry and tank units likely to deploy to Gaza are reservists, according to three senior officers, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The Israel Defense Forces were believed to have 200,000 soldiers on active duty before the call-up, three-quarters of whom were conscripts, but there are no official figures.
It has taken time for the military to stock up on enough equipment for its army. While all of Israel’s commandos have sufficient protective equipment, the army is still securing protective vests for some reservists, according to a senior officer. Several families have also said they privately obtained vests for their sons who were called up.
Meanwhile, more Palestinian civilians are leaving northern Gaza, although in dire conditions in the south, where shelter, fuel, water, medicine and food are lacking, and where Israeli attacks also continue.
Many Palestinians say they fear Israel will ultimately try to force them into Egypt, never to return, in a mass expulsion they compare to the Nakba, an Arabic term that refers to the flight or expulsion of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the wars that surrounded the creation of Israel in 1948.
Israel says the call to evacuate is to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible during upcoming military operations in the north.
To that end, from the military control room in southern Israel, General Ben Muha was trying to encourage more Gazans to head south. Military officers called Palestinians directly and Air Force planes dropped leaflets urging Gazans to ignore Hamas demands that they stay put.
Spread out on the general’s desk were files and spreadsheets listing the phone numbers of hundreds of community leaders, hospital directors, and school administrators in Gaza, all of whom a soldier in the control room could call at any time. moment.
On a nearby whiteboard, attendees had detailed the timing of regular airdrops of leaflets across northern Gaza.
On the live map in front of the general, there were fewer and fewer red and white spots: up to 700,000 Gazans had moved south by Monday afternoon, the data suggested, leaving about 400,000 in the north.
Once a neighborhood turns green on the map, an Israeli officer operating in the area will have greater room for maneuver due to the lower likelihood of harming civilians during the fight against Hamas, the general said.
“If you’re a brigade commander and you see those colors, it tells you how many civilians are in the area and you know whether or not you can use your tank, your infantry,” he said.
Palestinians say such measures mean little amid the enormous loss of life and hardship caused by shelling and displacement. Civilians and aid workers say many people lack transportation to travel south or are too sick to make the trip.
“I don’t think there’s anything humanitarian about uprooting” so many people, said Khaled Elgindy, director of the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute, a research group in Washington.
“There is no place in Gaza that is safe,” Elgindy added by phone Monday. “So the whole notion that they are somehow behaving in a way that is humanitarian or respects human life in Gaza is Orwellian.”
The surveillance method has already been used during the Israeli Air Force’s attacks on Rimal, a wealthy neighborhood in Gaza City that was left in ruins after being bombed last Tuesday in retaliation for Hamas attacks. Israeli officials said Hamas had built military infrastructure beneath the neighborhood.
Before that attack, soldiers in the surveillance room called some residents in the area to encourage them to leave, the general said. They then notified the Air Force as soon as the neighborhood turned green on the map, indicating less than a quarter of its population remained, the general said.
The general said that before proceeding, the Air Force had conducted its own assessment of the potential cost in civilian lives of each individual attack.
But these controls only went so far.
Among the civilians killed during the attacks was Saeed al-Taweel, editor of an Arabic news website.
Patrick Kingsley reported from Beersheba, Israel, and Ronen Bergman from Kfar Azza, Israel. Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Caesarea, Israel.
