As Israel’s invasion of Rafah enters its third week, hundreds of thousands of people who fled southern Gaza are facing miserable conditions in new camps and shelters.
Lack of food, clean water and toilets has made moving particularly harrowing, Gazans say, and skyrocketing prices have made travel unaffordable for people in need of transportation, including the elderly and disabled.
“We are facing a terrible situation,” said Khalil el-Halabi, a retired U.N. official in his 70s who left Rafah last week for al-Mawash, a coastal area designated by Israel as a “humanitarian zone.”
“We don’t have what it takes,” Halabi said. “We can barely even find water.”
More than 800,000 people have left Rafah in the past two weeks, UN officials said on Monday. The Israeli military said more than 950,000 civilians in the city had been displaced since issuing expanded evacuation orders the same day. An estimated 300,000 to 400,000 civilians remain there, a military spokesman said.
The latest wave of refugees in Gaza began on May 6, when Israel sent an evacuation notice and launched a military operation in eastern Rafah, along the border with Egypt. More than half of the resident civilians were seeking refuge in the city, many of them after fleeing multiple rounds of fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
Wheelchair-bound basketball player Ali Jebril, 27, said he and his family paid $600 to take 35 people by bus from the eastern city of Rafah to Khan Younis earlier this month.
Mr Jebril, who said his wheelchair was unable to move around the sandy beach area where many people had settled, moved into a tent on the grounds of a hospital in Khan Younis.
“We are not living a decent life,” he said. “We are facing disaster.”
He said the war left him feeling like a burden on society and he often turned to others for help.
Following Israel’s invasion of Rafah, Rafah’s once overcrowded shelters and tent villages have been largely empty, Edem Warsornu of the U.N. Humanitarian Affairs Office told the Security Council on Monday. People have moved to areas near Khan Younis and Deir al Balah, setting up temporary camps lacking sanitation, water, drainage and shelter, she said.
“We described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, like hell on Earth,” Wosornu said. “It’s all this and worse.”
Since the war began in October, three-quarters of Gaza’s population has become refugees, and many have moved four or five times, she said.
Israel issued the order as a humanitarian measure to protect civilians ahead of further military action. They say it is needed to eradicate Hamas fighters from southern Gaza. But aid groups say the additional refugees are worsening an already catastrophic humanitarian situation.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs described in its latest update that people are living in clusters of 500 to 700 tents, many of which are made of blankets, nylon or other available materials. According to the report, some tents were pitched on unstable beach slopes, causing waste from higher areas to flow past residential areas and into the sea.
Halabi said food was available at the market, but his family was so tight on money that it was difficult to pay for it.
“After seven months of war, we have almost nothing,” he said.
Although the number of commercial trucks entering Gaza has been increasing in recent days, aid supplies coming south through the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings have virtually stopped. UNRWA, the UN’s main agency responsible for assisting Palestine, said 69 aid trucks had entered through the two intersections in the 16 days to Tuesday. This is the lowest rate since the first week of the war.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN’s highest body supporting Palestine, wrote on social media that each transfer is fraught with risk and carries enormous costs.
“Each time, they are forced to leave behind the few belongings they have, including mattresses, tents, cooking utensils and basic items that they cannot carry or pay for transport,” he wrote. “Every time they have to start over. ”
