Civilians in Rafah no longer know what to do

#Civilians #Rafah #longer

In the night between Monday and Tuesday, when the news began to spread that Hamas had “accepted” a proposal for a ceasefire, many civilians in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate, convinced that some kind of peace agreement had been reached , albeit temporary. But things they weren’t like that: the proposal “accepted” by Hamas was not the one shared with Israel, but the one put forward by two mediator states, Qatar and Egypt, and no agreement had been reached.

A few hours later, the Israeli army carried out a military operation at the Rafah crossingthe city in the south of the Gaza Strip which is home to 1.4 million civilians, the majority of whom are refugees: in a few hours the Palestinians went from celebrating to having to decide where to take refuge to escape Israeli bombing and fighting.

Palestinian civilians have been experiencing similar situations for months: since the beginning of the war, millions of people have had to abandon first their homes and then the makeshift shelters to which they had fled, to escape from the Israeli bombings which gradually spread into the Gaza Strip. Gaza. Very often the Israeli army’s evacuation notices came with little warning, just enough to grab a few things and leave. And very often the warnings have been confusing and difficult to put into practice. There is also at least one case confirmed in which the army bombed the places where it had evacuated civilians, in December 2023.

The past few days, however, have also been particularly confusing for Palestinian civilians who have been accustomed for months to having their lives turned upside down by the war: it was like being on a “roller coaster”, he wrote il Wall Street Journal.

For example, on Monday, when the news arrived that Hamas had “accepted” a truce proposal, hundreds of thousands of people in Rafah who had been away from home for months hoped to be able to return. Then came the disappointment when it became clear that no agreement had been reached. «I had started packing my bags and was ready to return to my neighborhood in Gaza City, but the bad news took us by surprise», he said a BBC Rasha Sheikh Khalil, a displaced woman in Rafah, where she lives in a tent.

In Gaza, the fact that the internet is unstable and blackouts are very frequent contributes to the confusion and spread of uncontrolled news, which very often makes it difficult to understand what is happening.

“We can’t make any plans,” he told al Wall Street Journal Zahra Shweikhi, a woman who also lives in a tent in Rafah. «We keep hearing news that negotiations stop and start again, they go well and they go bad. But we are desperate and exhausted, and everything can give us hope, even false news of an agreement.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli army continued to carry out preparations for the invasion of Rafah: Monday ordered the evacuation of more than 100 thousand people from the city, and attacked the crossing on Tuesday.

Palestinian civilians were forced to flee once again. CNN spoke with Rabee Gharableh, a man who has done seven evacuations since the start of the war, fleeing from one city to another, and who has just been displaced again from Rafah: «The situation is very difficult. We fled out of fear, because civilians’ homes are being targeted.”

The evacuation order issued by Israel for more than one hundred thousand people in Rafah (which will probably be expanded as military operations in the city expand) has further complicated matters. The army ordered the population to move to al Mawasi, a large area on the coast outside the big cities. In theory, the army would have prepared tents for displaced people, infrastructure and a field hospital in al Mawasi.

But Palestinian civilians and humanitarian organizations say the area is already crowded and there is a lack of the necessities of life, from drinking water to food. “It’s not a place where people can pitch a tent and where they can meet their basic needs,” he told CNN Scott Anderson, one of the leaders of the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA).

Other Palestinians are trying to return to Khan Yunis, the largest city in the center of the Strip, but months of war have reduced many buildings to rubble: even there there are no conditions for living. The Wall Street Journal told the story of Noureddine Zaki, a man from Khan Yunis, who was forced to leave the city at the beginning of the fighting. When the Israeli army withdrew last month, Zaki returned to his home, but left it again because there was no water and the structures were at risk of collapsing.

He then moved with his family to Rafah, like many others, but the new offensive by the Israeli army forced him to flee again. At that point, he decided to return permanently to his home, in Khan Yunis, despite the risk of collapse: “There is nothing left here, but where else can we go?”.