Israel and Hamas at war, day 197 | In Rafah, nine people from the same family die before the announced ground assault

(Rafah) Nine people, parents and children from the same family, died in an Israeli strike on their house. In Rafah, death comes from the sky before the ground assault announced by Israel on the town in the south of the Gaza Strip.

Before the outbreak of war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in October last year, Rafah, whose suburbs lick the Egyptian border, had 250,000 inhabitants.

The United Nations today lists around 1.5 million — out of the 1.7 million displaced throughout the coastal territory, a million of whom live in tents or near shelters deployed by NGOs.

Pushed ever further south by the war, they are today crowded together in extremely precarious conditions in Rafah, where there is a lack of water, food, medicine and housing.

And now often, as on the night from Friday to Saturday, when the city remained Gaza’s last refuge for months, it is targeted by Israeli strikes.

The Radwan family, parents, brothers, sisters and cousins, were sleeping when death seized them.

“Nine martyrs, including six children, were extracted from the rubble” of their house in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, Gaza Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said in a statement sent to the AFP.

Six children aged between one and 16 were among the dead, as well as two women and a man, said Al-Najjar hospital where they were admitted.

Outside the hospital, an AFP journalist saw relatives mourning the deceased and gathered in front of small white plastic body bags. A woman stroked a dead boy’s forehead as planes roared overhead.

“People were sleeping peacefully,” testified a neighbor, Abou Mohammed Ziyadah. “As you can see, there were no fighters, not even adult men, except for the head of the family. There were only women and children,” he told AFP on the spot.

Not far from there, Wissam al-Arja saw his last hour arrive: an Israeli officer called him to tell him to leave his home within 15 minutes, because the army was going to bomb it. An hour after this call, a bomb fell on the building.

With his loved ones, he searched the rubble on Saturday to try to recover some things: there a coat covered in dust dug out of the ruins by a child, here blankets, a cup, a saucepan, intact despite the deluge of fire.

Roads closed

Shortly after the war in the Gaza Strip began on October 7, Israel asked Palestinians living in the north to move to “safe zones” in the south, such as Rafah.

Six months later, Rafah is under threat of an imminent ground offensive. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was determined to launch an assault on the city where, according to him, four Hamas battalions are concentrated.

But NGOs and a growing number of foreign chancelleries are opposed to this operation, fearing that it will cause numerous civilian victims.

The Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson noted that strikes hit several areas in Rafah overnight, including the Salam neighborhood where one person was killed and several others injured.

He added that the army hit a house and a nursery school. “The night was very hard for the governorate of Rafah,” he said.

The Israeli strikes and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip left 34,049 dead, mostly women and children, according to a report from the Hamas Health Ministry published on Saturday.

The war was launched in retaliation for the unprecedented attack by the Islamist movement on Israeli territory on October 7 which resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, also a majority of civilians, according to an AFP count based on official figures. Israelis.

On Saturday, Israeli media claimed that 250,000 people had recently left Rafah heading north, following Israel’s withdrawal of most of its ground troops.

Contacted by AFP, Cogat, an agency of the Israeli Ministry of Defense responsible for Palestinian civil affairs, did not comment on these figures.

“This is false,” responded a spokesperson for the Hamas government. “The displaced did not return to their homes because the occupation (the Israeli army) closed the roads” linking the south to the north of Gaza, Mael al-Thawabta told AFP.