by As Ghada Abu Samra leaves the room in Rafah where she, her mother and brother have been living in search of food and clean water, she sees more Gazans arriving in the already overcrowded southern city.
“Every day the numbers are growing enormously,” said Abu Samra, a 24-year-old web development student who has been in Rafah for weeks. “There is no place for anyone except to sit on the streets and build a tent.”
While nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been driven from their homes by Israel’s nearly three months of airstrikes and evacuation orders, Rafah, once a city of 300,000, has become in the main shelter for the displaced. More than a million people are packed into the city, in a small corner of the enclave on the border with Egypt, the United Nations said this week.
People struggle to find the materials to make even the most improvised tents, which stretch out in rows on the sandy ground. The misery is compounded by the spread of disease and an already overwhelmed health system, according to the United Nations. The city is not safe either: airstrikes are hitting all of Gaza, including areas to which the Israeli army has asked Gazans to flee.
Israel launched the war after Hamas, the political and armed group that controls the territory, carried out an attack on October 7 in southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities.
With Rafah’s increasingly dense population, the potential death toll from a single attack is high, the Al Mezan Center, a Gaza-based human rights organization, said on social media.
More than 160 people were killed in airstrikes in Gaza in the previous 24 hours, Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Friday. According to the ministry, the death toll in three months has exceeded 20,000 people, many of them women and children.
On Thursday, the Gaza government’s media office said Israeli strikes on six locations in Rafah had killed dozens of people in the previous three days.
“Rafah is not at all sure; On the road I pass every day, three rockets fell yesterday, killing 10 people,” said Ms. Abu Samra, adding that her family had been displaced seven times since the war began. “At any moment they can kill me. “You don’t know who gets next.”
“The places where Israelis say ‘this area is safe, go there,’ no place is safe,” he said.
But even more are expected to flee to Rafah. On Wednesday, the Israeli military dropped leaflets on residents of two blocks of the city of Deir el-Balah, an area home to 4,700 people in central Gaza, ordering them to head to shelters, according to the United Nations. But many people have chosen to head directly to Rafah, worried about having to flee again.
“The situation in Rafah is complete misery,” said Mohammed Shaath, 68, a retired engineer from the southern city of Khan Younis who has been helping a group with aid distribution in Rafah, including helping to cook meals. hot.
“There is not a single empty centimeter in Rafah,” he said. “Carps everywhere. And by tents I don’t mean the proper tents that people are familiar with. “It’s just anything that covers the head.”
People sign up to receive a tent from the United Nations or the Palestinian Red Crescent, he said, but receiving one can take a long time and people cannot wait, especially in the miserable winter conditions. Consequently, many use old wood, plastic and nylon beams from nearby greenhouses to build any type of shelter, she said.
Finding the materials to build even the most ramshackle shelters has become a daily routine for many in Rafah, he said.
Despite the conditions, Shaath said he is preparing to move there with his family although he does not know where they will live. He said the Israeli army recently warned residents of a block near his home in Khan Younis and those sheltering there to flee.
He fears his block will be next.
“I have no other option for me and my family,” he said. “They will bomb us here in Khan Younis.”
“I’m not worried about myself,” he added. “I’m already 68 years old. I’m worried about the children. “They are the future.”
