Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.

Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue towards Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said, according to Reuters.

Israel’s attacks in the north of Gaza, and the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fueled warnings that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.

The Israeli army has denied any such intention, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. 

However, hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back, reports Reuters.

The Israeli army is rapidly accelerating its plans to establish a permanent presence in the Gaza Strip, where it will likely remain until at least the end of 2025, according to a report by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. 

“The work is progressing at full speed,” the newspaper reported. 

“Wide roads are being built, cellular antennas are going up, water, sewage, and electricity networks are going in, and of course, there are the buildings, some portable and others less so,” it added. 

These plans have included the systematic destruction of buildings across Gaza.

The construction work and setting up of permanent outposts have not been limited to the north.

“According to the plan that is being carried out, the army is acting to hold no fewer than four large areas in different parts of the Strip. One of the most prominent of them is the Netzarim corridor,” Haaretz said. 

“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” Saed, 48, a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.

“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.