IT'S NOT ETHNIC CLEANSING WHEN WE DO IT:

Palestinians scrambled to flee northern Gaza on Saturday after the Israeli military ordered nearly half the population to evacuate south and carried out limited ground forays ahead of an expected land invasion a week after Hamas' wide-ranging attack into Israel.

Israel renewed calls on social media and in leaflets dropped from the air for some 1.1 million residents to move south, while Gaza authorities urged people to stay in their homes. The UN and aid groups have said such a rapid exodus would cause untold human suffering, with hospital patients and others unable to relocate.

Families in cars, trucks and donkey carts packed with possessions crowded a main road heading away from Gaza City as Israeli airstrikes continued to hammer the small, besieged territory . Palestinian witnesses said Israel struck cars rushing south, and authorities said the strikes killed more than 70 people.

ON FRIDAY, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip's upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today from Gaza, "refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we're running out of food, water, and power." The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create "devastating humanitarian consequences" and will "transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation." Over the last week, Israel's violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is "only the beginning."

Israel's campaign to displace Gazans--and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt--is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.

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