The struggle for life’s basics in Gaza’s Rafah
The fear has been building for weeks.
More than 1 million Palestinians fled into Rafah, the southernmost region of the Gaza Strip, hoping to escape the war. Now, Israel has threatened to extend its invasion there, too.
Amid days filled with struggles to secure food, water and shelter, uncertainty has dominated people’s conversations, said Khalid Shurrab, a charity worker staying with his family in a leaky tent in Rafah.
“We have two options, either to stay as we are or face our destiny — death,” said Shurrab, 36. “People literally have no other safe place to go.”
Rafah, which so far had been spared the brunt of Israel’s onslaught, has become a new focal point of a war now in its sixth month. It is where most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have ended up.
And now, with Israel signaling its intent to go after Hamas militants in Rafah, and Egypt blocking most Palestinians in Gaza from crossing its border to the south, families fear they are trapped.
In Rafah Governorate, home to fewer than 300,000 people before the war, space has become a rare commodity.
Cooking gas is so scarce that the air is acrid with smoke from fires burning salvaged wood and chopped-up furniture. Fuel is expensive, so people walk, ride bicycles, or take carts drawn by donkeys and horses. Since Rafah sits along the Egyptian border, where most of the aid enters from, it receives
more supplies than other parts of Gaza.
Still, many residents are so desperate that they throw rocks at aid trucks to try to make them stop or swarm them to try to grab whatever they can. Hundreds of people were killed and injured amid a stampede and Israeli gunfire when a convoy of trucks tried to deliver aid in Gaza City, in the territory’s north, last month.
Most people taking shelter in Rafah spend their days trying to secure basic need.
“Everything is difficult here,” said Hadeel Abu Sharek, 24, who is staying with her 3-year-old daughter and other relatives in a shuttered restaurant in Rafah. ”
In another development, the Israeli military confirmed that it had bombed an aid warehouse in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, saying it had “precisely targeted” and killed a Hamas commander in an attack that the United Nations said also killed at least one aid worker and injured 22 others.
The Israeli military said the Hamas commander, whom it identified as Muhammad
Abu Hasna, was “involved in taking control of humanitarian aid” and coordinating “the activities of various Hamas units.”
UNRWA, the U.N. agency that supports Palestinians, said the strike in Gaza’s southernmost city hit one of its facilities that serves as both an aid warehouse and a food distribution center.
The agency, formally the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, is the largest provider of aid on the ground in Gaza and the chief lifeline for the enclave’s 2.2 million residents, more than half of whom have been forced by Israeli military orders or fighting to cram into Rafah.
The UNRWA facility was not distributing food to civilians Wednesday, but more than 50 staff members were working at the facility when it was hit by Israeli forces around noon, according to Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications. Physical damage to the facility appeared to be minimal, but the human toll was “quite high,” and some of the 22 wounded aid workers were “severely injured,” she said.