International pressure is increasing to try to prevent a feared offensive by the Israeli army in the town of Rafah, in the far south of the Gaza Strip. According to the UN, some 1.4 million Gazans are currently refugees there, a large majority of displaced people who fled IDF bombings in the rest of the enclave – before October 7, the city only had 280,000 inhabitants. “There is simply nowhere to go,” alerted Canada, Australia and New Zealand on Thursday February 15.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, defended on February 9 the idea that“it is impossible to achieve the objective of the war without eliminating Hamas and leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah”comments reported by the Israeli presidency. “Intense activity in Rafah requires civilians to evacuate combat zones,” the leader continued, calling on the IDF and Israeli security services to develop an evacuation plan.
Evacuation plans still vague and “illusory”
Two days later, on the American channel ABC, the leader assured that Israel took seriously the security of the civilians of Rafah and their evacuation, promising to open a “secure passage” : “We don’t approach this casually. It’s part of our war effort, to keep civilians out of harm’s way.” The Prime Minister remained unclear on the place or places that could accommodate such a population, already displaced from the north to the south of the Palestinian enclave. “North of Rafah, there are many areas there. We are developing a detailed plan to do that,” he simply replied.
According to newspaper information Haaretz, Israeli forces refer to the al-Mawasi area, north of Rafah. A territory of 16 km2, the surface area… of Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv (Israel). In the event that 1 million Gazans were moved to this area, the density there would be 62,500 people per km2 (three times that of the city of Paris). All in an area in dire need of drinking water or hospitals, specifies the Israeli daily.
But according to Egyptian officials cited by the Wall Street Journal, al-Mawasi could be just one of the sites envisaged as part of a plan consisting of settling the displaced populations in a strip of around twenty kilometers along the Gaza coast, from the north of Rafah to the south of the devastated city of Gaza. The Israeli army would create 15 “tent cities”, each comprising around 25,000 tents for the displaced, these sources detail to the American daily.. A total of 375,000 makeshift homes, therefore, for a population estimated at 1.4 million Palestinians. “Where are these tent cities?” asks franceinfo Juliette Touma, director of communications for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). The agency, she explains, only became aware of these projects through the media.
Could the Israeli army force hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave Rafah to take refuge in these areas? According to international humanitarian law, forcible transfers of civilians in armed conflict are prohibited, “unless the security of the civilians concerned or military imperatives so require”, specifies the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). If travel is necessary, “all possible measures must be taken to ensure that displaced people are received in satisfactory conditions” in terms of housing, security, food, hygiene or sanitation.
The territories mentioned by the Wall Street Journal And Haaretz are presented as safe zones by Israel, but humanitarian organizations repeat that no region of the enclave is safe from the conflict. “I don’t believe there is any place in Gaza where these conditions are met. It’s completely illusory,” reacts to franceinfo Frédéric Joli, spokesperson for the ICRC in France.
A dangerous return to central and northern Gaza
“Intense Israeli bombardment…continues to be reported across much of the Gaza Strip,” confirms the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). At the end of the year, following a brief humanitarian truce, the IDF began to intensify its operations in the south of the Palestinian territory. At the start of the ground intervention, however, she ordered civilians from the north to go there to escape the fighting.
“Israel has never succeeded in providing safe passage to civilians in Gaza. More than two-thirds of the Gaza Strip is already under an evacuation order.”
Omar Shakir, director of Israel and Palestine research at Human Rights Watchat franceinfo
Since Israel says it is preparing an offensive on Rafah, the refuge city has been hit by an intensification of strikes, pushing some displaced people to flee once again, this time towards the center and north of the Gaza Strip. According to OCHA, “population movements” departing from Rafah have been observed in recent days towards Deir al-Balah, in the center, or towards the Nuseirat refugee camp, further north.
A return to these areas is particularly risky, warns Juliette Touma of UNRWA. “It is very dangerous to return to a place after the end of a military operation there, while the war continues. These places have a lot of munitions that have not exploded,” she emphasizes. “Not to mention the level of destruction. Where will these people go?” In the Gaza Strip, more than 60% of housing has been damaged or destroyed, according to OCHA, which uses figures from the Hamas-led government in Gaza. Only five hospitals are still (partially) operational in the North, six in the South, and 22 health establishments are no longer functioning due to the war.
In northern Gaza too, the situation is critical in terms of water and food. The northern governorates of the enclave no longer have access to drinking water: at the beginning of December, a quarter of the families there were already in a situation of food insecurity “catastrophic” and 40% in a situation “urgent”according to the IPC, a global reference source for malnutrition, which projected a deterioration in the situation.
An “exhausted” population, “which can no longer be moved”
On Tuesday, the World Food Program (WFP) warned of a new exodus of the Gazan population, already very weakened. “With each move, resilience declines”, called back on the director of the WFP for Palestine. Frédéric Joli evokes a population “under humanitarian drip, and trucks that fit very little” since the start of hostilities. On average, 133 humanitarian aid trucks entered the Gaza Strip each day in early February, compared to around 500 daily arrivals before the war. The enclave lacks everything, and the disastrous sanitary conditions of the displaced people lead to hundreds of thousands of cases of infections.
“The population is often exhausted. It is totally exhausted, it no longer has any resources. A massive population displacement will send many to death.”
Frédéric Joli, ICRC spokespersonat franceinfo
“It’s about moving a population that can no longer be moved,” insists Frédéric Joli. Among the displaced, people with disabilities, pregnant women and the injured – including amputee patients – will have great difficulty leaving Rafah. In the event of an offensive on this city, “Forcing more than a million Palestinians to evacuate again would be illegal and would have catastrophic consequences,” summarizes Omar Sharik, of Human Rights Watch. However, in Rafah, “Forced displacement, which constitutes a war crime, is increasingly becoming a risk.”