Panic in Rafá, last refuge for Palestinians

Panic spread across southern Gaza yesterday after at least 44 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes in the city of Rafah, as residents fear Tel Aviv’s planned ground invasion. Rafah, on the southern border with Egypt, is the last refuge for Gaza’s civilian population and one of the few areas that has not yet been the target of an Israeli ground offensive. Before the current conflict it was home to 280 thousand people, but currently more than half of the 2.3 million residents of the strip live there.

Most are squeezed into tents, makeshift shelters, schools or hospital grounds, after being uprooted several times by Israeli evacuation orders as the military campaign through the territory progresses in the four months of war.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday announced the order to the military to prepare dual evacuation and ground invasion plans for Rafah, raising questions about where exactly civilians could be evacuated. More than two-thirds of Gaza territory have been evacuated, and large swaths of the strip lie in ruins.

Netanyahu’s decision to publicly announce invasion plans is likely to raise tensions between Israel and its closest ally, the United States, which have already been rising in recent weeks. US officials called for caution in Israeli military options, saying that an invasion of Rafah without a plan for the civilian population would lead to disaster.

It is impossible to achieve the war objective of eliminating Hamas by leaving four battalions in RafahNetanyahu’s office said yesterday. On the contrary, it is clear that the intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians leave the combat zones.

I think this is the last roll of the dice as to whether to continue this phase of the war against Hamas, before pressure for a ceasefire builds.declared to The Independent Yossi Mekelberg, a fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. My main concern is the price it will have on the civilian population., he added. Non-governmental organizations working in the territory warned of a blood bath if Israeli troops advance towards Rafah. It was reported that among the 44 killed by the airstrikes this Saturday there were a dozen children.

A war cannot be allowed in a giant refugee campsaid Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

There is growing panic in Rafásaid Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency’s office for Palestinian refugees. People have nowhere to go.

The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said: The action of the Israeli occupation threatens security and peace in the region and in the world. It is a blatant violation of all red lines.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi wrote on the social network X: An Israeli attack on 1.5 million Palestinians facing inhuman conditions in Rafah will cause a massacre of innocent people.

In the town of Khan Younis, a little north of Rafah, Israeli forces continued the intensive operations underway since early December. The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that the Israeli military has surrounded the Nasser Hospital, which houses more than 450 patients, 300 medical workers and 10,000 refugees.

Elsewhere, Palestinian and Lebanese officials said a senior Hamas official survived an assassination attempt in Lebanon yesterday. Reports from that country indicated that an Israeli drone hit a car in the coastal town of Jadra, 40 kilometers north of the border, killing two bystanders.

Israel’s war against Hamas began after the militant group’s attack in southern Israel on October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage to Gaza. Israel responded by launching airstrikes, a blockade and a ground invasion. Health officials in Hamas-ruled Gaza say more than 28,000 people have been killed in the four months of the conflict.

Yesterday, at least seven people were arrested during a protest in Tel Aviv that was strongly repressed by the police to demand that Netanyahu’s government reach an agreement for the release of the kidnapped people. The arrests occurred after some of the protesters blocked part of the Ayalon highway, the police reported, cited by the newspaper. Times of Israelafter some of them carried out burnings to cut off traffic.

© The Independent

Translation: Jorge Anaya