Israel launched an operation on Monday aimed at evacuating tens of thousands of Palestinian families from the east of the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
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The Israeli army is preparing a ground offensive in Rafah. According to a spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent, “thousands of people are leaving their homes”, after Israel issued an evacuation order to residents of the east of this town in the south of the Gaza Strip on Monday, May 6, transformed into a gigantic refugee camp sheltering, according to the UN, 1.2 million Palestinians, or half of the territory’s population, most of them displaced people.
While the Israeli army called in the morning on Gazans present in eastern Rafah to join “humanitarian zones”, the Palestinian civil defense of Gaza assured AFP that the forces of the Jewish state had intensified bombings on two neighborhoods of the city. Israeli aerial and artillery bombardments, “have been going on since last night and have intensified since this morning”, a spokesperson explained, specifying that two of the targeted neighborhoods, al-Shuka and al-Salam, were among those that the Israeli army asked residents to evacuate.
Rafah evacuation order ‘inhumane’, UN says
“It is inhumane. It is contrary to the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement. The head of EU diplomacy Josep Borrell, for his part, judged “unacceptable” the evacuation order given by Israel to the inhabitants of the eastern city of Rafah, ensuring that this order “portends the worst: more war and famine. “Israel must abandon a ground offensive” in Rafah, he urged in a message published on X.
France, for its part, recalled on Monday its “firm opposition” to an Israeli offensive on Rafah, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasizing “that the forced displacement of a civilian population constitutes a war crime under international law.”
During a telephone interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, American President Joe Biden reiterated his opposition to this offensive, the White House said.