Israel’s military has informed the United Nations that the entire population of northern Gaza should relocate to the southern half of the territory within 24 hours, the U.N. spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said late on Thursday night, adding that such a movement — involving over one million people — would lead to “devastating humanitarian consequences.”
“The same order applied to all U.N. staff and those sheltered in U.N. facilities — including schools, health centers and clinics,” Mr. Dujarric said.
The U.N. was told that the marker dividing the north from south was Wadi Gaza, the statement said.
The U.N. Security Council is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting on Friday afternoon in a closed consultation format
The Iron Dome isn’t magic and intercepting rockets is not a fully solved problem. It’s usually able to intercept something like 90% of incoming rockets that it attempts to intercept. Part of its design is an ability to evaluate how dangerous a rocket is by judging where it is going to land, and it ignores those that it expects not to land in populated areas. During the crisis in May 2021 there were about 4,000 rockets launched over the course of a week, and the Dome managed about 90% of those. 400 rockets hitting targets is obviously still a lot of damage. But the thing is, the difficulty of intercepting each individual rocket goes up if you have to deal with several at once, and this current round of rockets may have been as many as 5,000 in one day. If Iron Dome takes x seconds to deal with one rocket and each rocket flies for 5x seconds, then launching 10 rockets at once means that the Dome just hasn’t got time to deal with them all before they land.
That doesn’t say anything one way or the other about foul play. But it’s not weird that an advanced anti-rocket system was overwhelmed; that’s just one of the known ways to defeat a system like that.