EMPTY STREETS AND FEAR IN RAFAH SINCE ISRAELI INCURSION
Life has completely ceased in the downtown area of Rafah, a resident says
Displaced Gazan Marwan Al Masri, sheltering in Rafah, said on Wednesday that “life has completely ceased” since Israeli tanks and troops entered the city’s east, sending Palestinians fleeing north in the besieged territory.
More than 1.4 million people had crammed into Rafah, a city on the Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt, as Israeli forces pushed their way southward from the coastal territory’s north during months of war against Hamas militants.
Many in Rafah have been displaced multiple times during the seven-month war, and are now heading back north after Israeli forces called for the evacuation of the city’s eastern part, which hosts tens of thousands of people.
State of paralysis
“Life has completely ceased in the downtown area of Rafah”, said 35-year-old Masri, who has been displaced from northern Gaza.
“The streets are empty of people, and markets are in a state of paralysis”, he told AFP.
“We all feel fear of any advancement in the invasion, as happened in the eastern areas, which are now completely empty of residents”.
Masri said he and his relatives “are tense and frightened” by the incessant shelling that they feel is getting closer.
Escape, and homelessness
Ibtihal Al Arouqi, who was displaced from Al Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, said she has found herself once again homeless.
“We emerged from under the rubble of our house in Al Bureij, and now due to intense shelling in Rafah, my children and I are in the street”, she said.
The 39-year-old said that only two weeks ago she gave birth by Caesarean section.
“We don’t know where to go. There is no safe place”, Arouqi said from west Rafah, where many Palestinians remain.
While it is relatively calmer than the city’s heavily bombarded east, the west has also been hit by shelling, an AFP journalist reported.
“The situation in Rafah is chaotic,” said Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, a medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) charity in Rafah.
Himself displaced from Gaza City, he described “people carrying their things, mattresses, blankets, kitchen items on trucks” to flee east Rafah. But “there’s no space anymore in the west of Rafah,” Abu Mughaiseeb told AFP.
The city’s Al Najjar hospital was “closed, evacuated by the medical team to avoid what happened in Al Shifa or Nasser”, he added, referring to two Gaza medical facilities raided by Israeli forces during the course of the war.
Caught between Israeli shelling from the east, an Egyptian border to the south and the Mediterranean to the west, many fleeing Rafah went north.
‘No room’
Caught between Israeli shelling from the east, an Egyptian border to the south and the Mediterranean to the west, many fleeing Rafah went north.
They headed towards the city of Khan Younis as well as Deir Al Balah in central Gaza. AFP footage on Wednesday showed thousands of shelters along Deir Al Balah’s coastal area.
“Deir Al Balah is a very small town that is now extremely overcrowded ... There’s no room or facilities to accommodate these people,” local merchant Abdelmajid Al Kurd said.