One million internally displaced Palestinians have taken refuge in Rafah, a city on the border of Egypt in the Gaza Strip, since the beginning of the war on 7 October, a Palestinian official told Turkiye’s Anadolu Agency (AA) on 4 December.
“The total number of people present in the city of Rafah at the moment is not less than 1.3 million, with the city's population being around 300,000,” said Ahmed al-Soufi, the head of Rafah municipality.
He said about 713,000 are living in shelters belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, (UNRWA), including those displaced outside the premises of the centers but registered with the UN agency.
The remaining 268,000 are living in public squares and in make-shift tents on the streets.
At the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli military leaders insisted that Palestinians flee the north of the besieged strip and head south amid a looming Israeli ground invasion. Israeli bombing then destroyed large areas of northern Gaza, in particular in Jabaliya and Beit Lahia. Hundreds of thousands fled south toward Khan Yunis and Rafah.
However, the Israeli army has widely bombed areas in the south as well and launched a massive ground operation in Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah. The influx of residents from the central and Khan Yunis areas to Rafah continues, amid warnings from the army for them to evacuate immediately.
On 29 December, AFP reported that Rafah residents searched through rubble for survivors and bodies after a deadly Israeli air strike.
One local man, Tayseer Abu al-Eish, said he was at home when "we heard a loud explosion and debris started falling on us. My daughters were screaming."
Reuters reported that 20 Palestinians were killed and 55 wounded in the strike on Rafah, according to Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra.
This followed the Israeli air strike that hit central Gaza's Maghazi refugee camp and killed 70 people on Christmas eve.
Continued Israeli bombing throughout Gaza and the accompanying siege is making much of the enclave uninhabitable.
“It’s a daily struggle,” Ms. Zaiter, 37, whose children range in age from 9 months to 13 years, told the New York Times. “You feel you are under pressure and hopeless, and you cannot provide anything.”
The newspaper reported further that half of the Gaza population of about 2.2 million “is at risk of starvation and 90 percent saying that they regularly go without food for a whole day, the United Nations said in a recent report.”
At the same time, Israeli political leaders continue to articulate their plans to force as many of Gaza’s residents as possible to flee as refugees to Egypt or European countries.
In the western media, they have couched the effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza as a “humanitarian measure” to help Palestinians. In Israeli media, Israeli leaders, including ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, have stated their intentions more clearly. They have repeatedly expressed their desire to conquer Gaza and forcibly expel its inhabitants in order to annex the enclave and build Jewish settlements there.
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