Combat near Rafah forces masses to flee
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Heavy fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants on the outskirts of the southern Gaza city of Rafah has left crucial nearby aid crossings inaccessible and forced more than 110,000 people to flee north, U.N. officials said Friday.
With nothing entering through the crossings, food and other supplies were running critically low, aid agencies said.
The World Food Program will run out of food for distribution in southern Gaza by Saturday, said Georgios Petropoulos, an official with the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Rafah. Aid groups have said fuel will also be depleted soon, forcing hospitals to shut down critical operations and bringing to a halt trucks delivering aid across southern and central Gaza.
The United Nations and other agencies have warned for weeks that an Israeli assault on Rafah, on the border with Egypt near the main aid entry points, would cripple humanitarian operations and cause a disastrous surge in civilian casualties. More than 1.4 million Palestinians — half of Gaza’s population — have been sheltering in Rafah, most after fleeing Israel’s offensives elsewhere.
Heavy fighting was also underway Friday in northern Gaza, where Hamas appeared to have again regrouped in an area where Israel has already launched punishing assaults.
Israel’s move into Rafah has been short of the full-scale invasion that it has planned. The United States is deeply opposed to a major offensive and is stepping up pressure by threatening to withhold arms to Israel.
But the heavy fighting has shaken the city and spread fear that a bigger assault is coming. Artillery shelling and gunfire rattled throughout the night into Friday, an Associated Press reporter in the city said.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said more than 110,000 people have fled Rafah. Families who have already moved multiple times during the war packed up to go again. One woman held a cat in her arms as she sat in the back of a truck piled with her family’s belongings about to head out.
The full invasion hasn’t started, “and things have already gotten below zero,” said Raed alFayomi, a displaced person in Rafah. “There’s no food or water.”
Those fleeing erected new tent camps in the city of Khan Younis — which was half-destroyed in an earlier Israeli offensive — and the town of Deir al-Balah, straining infrastructure.
The international charity Project Hope said its medical clinic in Deir al-Balah had seen a surge of people from Rafah seeking care for blast injuries, infections and pregnancies. “People are evacuating to nothing. There are no homes or proper shelters for people to go to,” said Moses Kondowe, the group’s Gaza team leader based in Rafah.
Petropoulos said humanitarian workers had no supplies to help them set up in new locations. “We simply have no tents, we have no blankets, no bedding, none of the items that you would expect a population on the move to be able to get from the humanitarian system,” he said.
Israeli troops captured the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, forcing it to shut down. Rafah was the main point of entry for fuel.
Israel says the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing — Gaza’s main cargo terminal — is open on its side and that aid convoys have been entering. It said trucks carrying 52,000 gallons of fuel were allowed to enter the crossing on Friday.
But the U.N. said it is too dangerous for workers to reach the crossing on the Gaza side to retrieve the aid because of Israel’s incursion and the ensuing fighting with Hamas.
Israeli troops are also battling Palestinian militants in eastern Rafah, not far from the crossings. The military said it had located several tunnels and eliminated militants in close combat and with airstrikes.
Israel says Rafah is the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza and key to its goal of dismantling the group’s military and governing capabilities and returning scores of hostages Hamas captured in its deadly Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to proceed with the Rafah offensive with or without U.S. arms, saying “we will fight with our fingernails” if needed, in a defiant statement late Thursday. The U.S. has stepped up weapons deliveries to Israel throughout the war, and the Israeli military says it has what it needs for Rafah operations.
Israel’s incursion into Rafah complicated what had been months of efforts by the U.S., Qatar and Egypt to broker a cease-fire and the release of hostages. Hamas this week said it had accepted an Egyptian-Qatari cease-fire proposal, but Israel says the plan does not meet its “core” demands. Follow-up talks appeared to end inconclusively on Thursday.