Palestinians trudging past Israeli tanks and decomposing corpses along a frontline passage out of encircled Gaza City have said they feared a new “Nakba”, the “catastrophe” of their mass dispossession after Israel was founded in 1948.

According to Reuters, thousands of people were moving south along Salah al-Din road out of Gaza City on Thursday, the only exit route for civilians escaping an intensifying siege as Israeli tanks rolled deeper into the Gaza Strip enclave.

“What do things look like behind us? Destruction and death. We left in fear,” said a woman who gave her name as Um Hassan. She had just crossed into southern Gaza from the north of the tiny, crowded territory.

“We are the poor Palestinian people whose houses were destroyed,” she said, calling it a second Nakba.

The war of 1948, when Palestinians fled or were evicted from their homes, is seared into their collective memory. Many have voiced fears that if forced from their homes now they will, like their ancestors, never be allowed back.