Early Tuesday morning, while workers with the Gaza Soup Kitchen prepared to serve meals for displaced families sheltering at a United Nations school in Mashrou’ Beit Lehia, Israel’s bombs began to fall.

For thirty minutes, Israeli military munitions and quadcopter gunfire rained down on a city block in northern Gaza, which included the UN-ran Khalifa school, a market and residential buildings, said mobile kitchen director Hani Almadhoun, relaying an account from his nephew, a kitchen staff member who survived the attack. Dozens scrambled for shelter from an airstrike that left at least four dead.

Among them was Almadhoun’s 16-year-old cousin, Samih Ibrahim Almadhoun, who had been volunteering at the kitchen. He was killed alongside two women sheltering together, Almadhoun said. Another cousin helping at the kitchen had his arm amputated after he was struck by rocket fire. Mourners were able to bury Samih in a hastily dug grave before fleeing the area.

The strike forced the kitchen out of Mashrou’ Beit Lehia and further south into Jabalia. Such movement is normal for the kitchen, which operates several mobile sites throughout the strip and relocates to wherever need is most acute. “We go where the people are,” Almadhoun said. Some families have come to rely on the Gaza Soup Kitchen as their primary source of food amid the ongoing starvation brought on by Israel’s unlawful blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza. But as of late, where the kitchen goes is dictated by bombings and evacuation orders.

In November, Almadhoun’s brother, Gaza Soup Kitchen co-founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, was killed in an Israeli drone strike while delivering food to Kamal Adwan Hospital, which had been under siege by the Israeli military. Almadhoun and his family have called the attack a targeted assassination, and said the military continues to target soup kitchen workers.

“We learned that if they bomb and they are serious, then we get the hell out,” he said. “We tried to be the last man standing, then we realized the world doesn’t give a shit. So, when they really push, we just run for the next area where they’re going to bomb in a week or two.”

This is the reality in Gaza: Death can come from the lack of food, or death can come from trying to find food.

Tuesday’s airstrike near the soup kitchen in Mashrou’ Beit Lehia was a part of a broader Israeli military a campaign launched last Sunday known as “Operation Gideon’s Chariots.” It involves intense bombardment in the north intended to push Palestinians further south, eventually concentrating Gaza’s population of about 2.1 million people into what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “sterile zone,” completely controlled by the Israeli military. The Israeli government has also used the term – “sterile zone” – in the occupied West Bank to refer to areas that isolate Palestinians while giving access to Israeli settlers. The zone would be the only place in the strip where Palestinians could receive food and aid supplies. Aid would be funneled into four distribution sites, with three in southern Gaza run by a new Swiss-based nonprofit and two U.S.-based security firms.

Both Israel and the U.S. claim the aid plan is meant to keep supplies from getting in the hands of Hamas, which they accuse of stealing goods and enriching themselves in the black market, an allegation denied by both Hamas and aid groups.

Earlier this month at a Jewish settler conference, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotritch, a member of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet who has long called for the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza, previewed the plan to push Palestinians to the south, referring to southern Gaza as “a humanitarian zone” along its border with Egypt. From the south, he said according to translations from Hebrew, Palestinians “will start to leave in great numbers to third countries” due to poor living conditions.

The southern Gaza area where Israel intends to push Palestinians has been under Israeli occupation since late March, when its military forced civilians out of the area’s largest city, Rafah. Though much of Rafah already lay in ruins from previous bombing campaigns, the Israeli military has been destroying what few structures remain. During its occupation, Israel established the Morag Corridor – a new road named for a former Israeli settlement in Gaza – that cuts off southern Gaza from the rest of the strip. While Netanyahu has said the security corridor is intended to root out Hamas militants, officials have also been vocal about their intent to erase Palestinian civilians.

“They will be totally despairing,” Smotritch said of Palestinians during the pro-settler conference, “understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”