Israel warns civilians to flee to safety before a strike.

If someone warns you to leave your home so they can steal it, then bombs the route they told you was safe, and then every shelter you reach, are they warning you, or ethnically cleansing you?

What safety? Gaza is a 365 km² enclave where 2.3 million people are already besieged in one of the most densely populated places on earth. Forcing them to flee again and again into tiny so-called "safe zones" before bombing them is not an evacuation but a mechanism of ethnic cleansing.

The very fact that the debate centers on whether a warning was issued minutes before entire neighborhoods are carpet bombed reveals the profound dehumanization of Palestinians. Israel's leaflets and text messages directing people to so-called "safe zones" that are later bombed serve as a cover for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The obligation under international humanitarian law is not to warn civilians before attacking them. It is to spare civilians from unlawful attack in the first place. Warnings cannot legalize the war crimes of willful killing, indiscriminate attacks, forcible transfer, or the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Not that issuing a warning absolves the crimes of willful killing or forcible transfer, but even that Israel has repeatedly failed to do. Across its military assaults, Israel has bombed residential buildings, displacement camps, schools, and hospitals without effective warning. In May 2024, Israel bombed a camp for displaced Palestinians in a designated "safe zone" in what became known as the Rafah tent massacre, killing at least 40 Palestinians. The bombing ignited a fire that burned entire families alive, leaving horrifying images of charred bodies and children burned beyond recognition.

Israel's claim that it issues prior evacuation warnings ignores that forced displacement is a systemic feature of its settler-colonial project. Since October 2023 alone, Israel forcibly displaced 90% of Gaza's population, carried out the largest wave of ethnic cleansing since 1967 in the West Bank, and displaced more than 1.2 million people in Lebanon. The pattern is one of forced displacement and land takeover.

Israel declares entire neighborhoods or governorates as evacuation zones on the grounds that they contain militants, orders civilians to flee to so-called "safe zones," and then bombs both. This reveals that the purpose of the warnings is not civilian protection, but the legitimization of mass displacement.

Israel's leaflets dropped from aircraft function primarily as a tool of psychological warfare, spreading terror to compel people to flee before entire neighborhoods are bombed. During the Nakba of 1948, Zionist forces similarly used radio broadcasts, loudspeakers, and leaflets to spread panic and facilitate the mass displacement of Palestinians. The medium has changed; the objective has not.