“Life has stopped in Rafah,” explains a Palestinian from this town in the south of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli troops have been carrying out incursions since Tuesday and whose residents are fleeing towards Deir al-Balah, a coastal town now bristling with thousands of people. tents.
More than 1.4 million people are crowded into Rafah, backing onto the Egyptian border, including more than a million displaced people pushed there by seven months of fighting and bombardment which reduced the north to ruins and then the central Gaza Strip.
Since Monday, the Israeli army has been carrying out massive bombardments and incursions into the eastern neighborhoods of the city, which it has ordered its residents to evacuate to the center of the Gaza Strip, as part of plans to wipe out Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007 and who carried out a bloody attack in southern Israel on October 7 that sparked the war.
“Life has completely stopped in the city center of Rafah” where “the streets are empty, the markets have stopped,” Marwan al-Masri, a 35-year-old Palestinian who found refuge in Rafah, described to AFP on Wednesday. after being driven out of the northern Gaza Strip.
“We all fear an advance” by Israeli troops, “like in the eastern neighborhoods” of Rafah, “now empty of their inhabitants,” he said, recounting that he and his relatives are now “all anxious and afraid” by the bombings. incessant, whose tremors they feel approaching.
Ibtihal al-Arouqi, who fled the al-Bureij camp in central Gaza to seek refuge in Rafah, finds himself homeless once again after leaving the east of the city.
“We emerged from the rubble of our house in Al-Bureij, and now, because of the intense bombing in Rafah, my children and I are on the streets,” she laments. “We don’t know where to go, there is no safe place,” this 39-year-old woman who gave birth by cesarean two weeks ago told AFP.
“Chaotic” situation
“The situation in Rafah is chaotic,” said Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Rafah, himself displaced from Gaza City at the start of the war.
People are leaving the neighborhoods and “carrying their belongings, mattresses, blankets, kitchen utensils in trucks,” he says, but “there is no more room in western Rafah.”
The al-Najjar hospital in Rafah is “closed, evacuated by the medical team who want to avoid what happened to al-Chifa and Nasser”, the two main ones in the Gaza Strip, targeted and reduced to the state of ruins by operations of the Israeli army which claims that Hamas used them for military purposes.
Most of those leaving Rafah are fleeing north towards the towns of Khan Yunis and Deir Al-Balah.
Originally from Gaza City in the north, Ahmed Fadel, 22, was first moved to the Nuseirat camp in the central Palestinian territory, where he left again when Israeli troops entered the neighboring one of al-Bureij.
Then, he explained to AFP, “we left for Rafah, but they shelled and threatened the city, so we came to Deir al-Balah which is already overpopulated.”
AFP journalists saw long lines of displaced Palestinians fleeing Rafah in cars, trucks, donkey carts, tuk-tuks or on foot, carrying what they could.
AFP images show thousands of tents and shelters crowded together on Wednesday along the coastal area of Deir al-Balah, whose streets are crowded with people unloading goods or selling goods.
Deir al-Balah is “a very small town that is now extremely overcrowded,” says Abdelmajid al-Kurd, a local trader, “there is no space or infrastructure to accommodate these people. »