JERUSALEM
— Less than two weeks after bombs began raining down on the Gaza Strip, Ghada Al-Kurd
arrived in the southern city of
Khan Younis. She had already been displaced
three times and hoped it would be her final journey to safety.
اضافة اعلان
But
three months later, Israeli forces advanced south. Al-Kurd, 37, speaking by
telephone, said she, her sister, brother-in-law, and four nieces and nephews
abandoned the tent they had been sharing “without taking anything with us,” and
headed to Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.
Many
of the roughly 1.7 million residents of Gaza that
UN agencies say have been
displaced by Israel’s relentless bombardment and ground invasion have fled
repeatedly over the course of a war that has now entered its fifth month. And
al-Kurd’s family members number among more than 1 million people who have
crowded into Rafah, only to hear that Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu ordered
the Israeli military Friday to draw up plans to evacuate “combat zones” in the
city in advance of an expected ground offensive.
What is the next move?
The
order, which set off international alarm, is forcing the displaced people
sheltering there, along with more than 200,000 of Rafah’s citizens, to weigh
their next move.
‘I regret leaving Gaza City’“I
regret leaving Gaza City,” said al-Kurd, whose two daughters stayed behind in
the north with their father. “If I stayed home it would have been better than
all the suffering and humiliation of displacement, because every time you flee
to a new place you have to start all over again.”
If
Israel allows it and the roads open, she said, she will immediately go back to
Gaza City, “and that will be my final time fleeing.”
Many
others now in Rafah also tell of repeated displacement. Talaat al-Qaisi said he
and his wife had just finished furnishing their new apartment, in the upscale
Rimal neighborhood of
Gaza City, when their building was bombed on October 10,
just days after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel that set off the war.
The
family escaped just in time, after seeing neighbors running from their own
homes. “We barely got out of the building when the bombing began on our
street,” Qaisi said, speaking by telephone.
They
sheltered at a nearby church, but on October 13, Israel ordered residents in
the north to evacuate. Qaisi and his son walked for more than four hours to his
sister’s apartment in Rafah and sent a car for his wife, who was ill, and the
rest of the family. All ten members of the family, including his
seventh-month-old grandson, are staying in a tiny one-room apartment in Rafah,
he said.
Asked
what he would do next, he said: “Planning anything has become useless and
pointless,” adding, “The situation keeps exceeding our previous predictions” of
how much worse it can get.
Qaisi
predicted complete chaos if Israeli forces moved into Rafah, with people likely
to start running in all directions, not knowing where to head.
“I
will move with the crowds, what else can I do? We have nowhere else to go,” he
said. “Other people I spoke to told me that they refuse to flee again even if
that means dying in their shelters.”
Mohammed
Al-Baradie, 24, said the threat of an Israeli advance on Rafah had persuaded
him to move again, in his fourth displacement. But his plan to flee to
Nuseirat, in central Gaza, was upended by heavy shelling there overnight, he
said.
Meanwhile,
on Sunday,
US President Joe Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu that a ground offensive in Rafah should not proceed without a plant
to protect the more than 1.4 million Palestinians clustered there, the latest
sign of frustration by the White House over the rising civilian deaths from the
latest assault by the IOF.
During
the call Sunday, according to a description from the White House, the two leaders
also discussed ongoing negotiations with Hamas to release Israeli hostages in
Gaza in exchange for a cease-fire and the release of Palestinians being held in
Israeli jails.
Last
week, Netanyahu bluntly rejected as “ludicrous” a response from Hamas in the
negotiations that called for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and the freeing of
Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of more than 100 Israeli
hostages in Gaza.
Israeli strikes killed over 100
Palestinians in Rafah, including women and childrenOn
Monday, Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling killed over 100 Palestinians,
including women and children, with hundreds more injured and arriving in Rafah
hospitals due to heavy Israeli airstrikes on the city, according to the
Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS).
“Half
of the people in Gaza are here in Rafah and they are in the same situation,” he
said in a voice message Saturday. “They don’t know where to go.”
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