As fighting raged Wednesday on the outskirts of Rafah, as Israeli forces closed in, Palestinians were on the move again, abandoning neighborhoods in the southern Gaza city and leaving them as ghost towns.
Israel has threatened to carry out a major attack on Rafah to defeat four of the six remaining Hamas battalions holed up there, but more than a million people have taken refuge in the city, prompting the United Nations to warn against a humanitarian catastrophe.
Israeli forces tasked with destroying the terror group seized the main border crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah on Tuesday, cutting off a vital aid route to the enclave, where malnutrition is widespread.
Israel continues to deliver aid through several crossing points, while the United States has completed construction of a dock that will allow large amounts of aid to be transferred into the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military said it was carrying out a limited operation in Rafah to kill terrorists and dismantle infrastructure used by Hamas, which rules Gaza. He asked civilians to go to an “expanded humanitarian zone” near Khan Younis, north of Rafah.
Three residents of Rafah told Reuters by telephone that tens of thousands of people had fled the town, considered the last refuge for Palestinians who were repeatedly displaced when Israeli airstrikes pulverized Gaza.
Residents of Jneina, Al-Shawka, Al-Salam and other neighborhoods were ordered by the Israeli army to leave in anticipation of an attack. Some 1.4 million people have taken refuge in Rafah, raising fears of many victims.
A boy walks among rubble at the site of a building hit by Israeli bombings in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, May 8, 2024. (AFP)
“Some streets now look like a ghost town,” said Aref, 35, who asked to remain anonymous.
“We are not afraid of death and martyrdom, but we have children to take care of and we will live another day when this war ends and we rebuild the city,” he told Reuters via chat app.
The war broke out on October 7 when Hamas terrorists rampaged through southern communities, murdering 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 253 hostages back to the enclave.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 34,000 people have been killed in fighting so far in the Gaza Strip, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes some 13,000 Hamas gunmen that Israel says it killed in combat. Israel also claims to have killed some 1,000 terrorists in Israel on October 7. Nearly 270 IDF soldiers were killed during the IDF offensive in Gaza.
Warnings for leaving
Many Rafah residents said they had received warnings by telephone and planes dropped leaflets.
Juliette Touma, communications director for the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, estimates that around 10,000 Palestinians have left Rafah since Monday.
The Hamas-led Gaza government’s media office put the number of people fleeing at tens of thousands and warned of a “massacre.”
Residents said tanks, which had moved in to take control of the Rafah border post, had not entered built-up areas of the city and fighting continued outside the city limits.
Israeli troops in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, in an image published on May 8, 2024. (Israeli Defense Force/AFP)
Suleiman Abu Kweik and his family are displaced for the fourth time.
“Our homes were destroyed. In Gaza (city), our house… they destroyed it. It was bombed. We went to Khan Younis. When they threatened Khan Younis, we went to Rafah,” he said.
Hamas said its members were fighting Israeli forces east of Rafah. Lines of smoke from airstrikes and tank shelling rose from some places east of the city, residents said.
“Some people are staying at home, even in the red zones, but I dare say that tens of thousands of people have already left Rafah, including areas west of the city, which are not included in the warning from the occupying army,” Mohammed said. Emad, 34 years old, father of three children.
Abu Ahmed Al-Najar said more than 60 families who were living in tent camps in Rafah’s Al-Jneina neighborhood had all left the area by Tuesday evening.
“Sixty-five families, or 400 people, are now homeless. People have no money, no tents, no one to support them,” he said.
Some, like Mazen Ghadour, loaded their meager belongings into old trucks.
“This is the third or fourth time we have had to move. We are eight families. We live in fear. There is no safe place in the entire Gaza Strip,” he said.
“God knows where we will go. We are heading into the unknown. We are heading into the unknown.
Displaced Palestinians arrive in central Gaza after fleeing the southern Gaza town of Rafah, in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip, May 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
The war was “terrible for women”
Women are bearing the brunt of war as hospitals face overcrowding and shortages, said a doctor who just left Rafah.
“In my 25 years of experience, I have never seen a conflict where people had to go in circles with nowhere to go,” Hairhound Lahna said.
A gynecologist, Lahna was head of mission for Rahma Worldwide, an American non-governmental organization, and Palmed, a French association for “health in Palestine”.
The war has been “horrible for women”, especially those forced to leave hospitals just hours after giving birth due to overcrowding, he told AFP by telephone.
“They find themselves in tents or shelters where people gather,” says this 57-year-old French doctor who worked at the European hospital in Khan Younis as well as at a maternity ward in Rafah.
Lahna, visibly affected, described witnessing the death of a mother from blood poisoning four days after giving birth.
“We are handing out antibiotics willy-nilly to deal with the situation” because the risk of infection is “huge”, with women not having enough water to wash and being unable to put on clean clothes, a -he declared Tuesday in the interview.
Gaza’s health system is in tatters, with many hospitals targeted or hit by Israeli forces. Israel has published evidence that Hamas regularly operates from health facilities.
Palestinian doctors treat a young girl injured during the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip at the Kuwaiti hospital in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, May 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramez Habboub)
A UN Women report released this week says women and girls in Rafah and the rest of the Gaza Strip are in “a constant state of despair and fear.”
The study found that 93 percent of those surveyed felt unsafe, 80 percent experienced feelings of depression, 66 percent were unable to sleep and 70 percent suffered from intense anxiety and nightmares.
In addition, more than half of them “suffer from a health problem requiring urgent medical attention,” the report states.
“More liveable”
Scenes north of the narrow coastal strip “seem straight from post-World War II Berlin” or the Chechen capital Grozny, Lahna said, describing it as “no longer livable.”
Lahna said Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern city of Beit Lahia, which he visited last week, was “a five-star hotel” compared to the destruction in the rest of the city.
The medical center’s director revealed in a Shin Bet interrogation published in December that his hospital in northern Gaza had been transformed into a military facility under Hamas control and at one point housed a soldier kidnapped.
An emergency doctor doing voluntary work in Rafah and nearby Khan Younis said the situation was “catastrophic”.
Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah was a “red zone” where patients and staff were fleeing “out of fear”, Dr James Smith said.
Displaced Palestinians who left with their belongings from Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, following an evacuation order from the Israeli army, arrive in Khan Younis on May 6, 2024. (AFP)
Sunday’s closure of the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, after a rocket attack claimed by Hamas killed four Israeli soldiers, interrupted the supply of medicine and personnel to support field hospitals.
“The smell of sewage is everywhere,” Smith said. “In recent days, the situation has gotten worse.”
Smith said he deals with cases of jaundice, likely due to hepatitis that cannot be diagnosed due to a lack of available testing.
Other cases included children and adults suffering from “complex respiratory problems, diarrhea and vomiting”, he said.
News Source : www.timesofisrael.com
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