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Aid Groups Warn of Rafah ‘Bloodbath’ If Israel Advances

Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. (AP)
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. (AP)
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Aid Groups Warn of Rafah ‘Bloodbath’ If Israel Advances

Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. (AP)
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. (AP)

Any Israeli military advance into southern Gaza's Rafah area could cause mass deaths among the more than a million Palestinians trapped there, with humanitarian aid in danger of collapse, aid workers said on Friday.

Israel has threatened to advance from Khan Younis, Gaza's main southern city, to Rafah, where the population has increased five-fold as people have fled bombardment, often under evacuation orders, since Israel began its assault on Gaza's ruling Hamas movement.

Some 1.5 million people are now jammed into filthy, overcrowded shelters or on the street in a patch of land hemmed in by Egyptian and Israeli border fences and the Mediterranean Sea as well as Israeli forces.

Doctors and aid workers are struggling to supply even basic aid and stop the spread of disease.

"No war can be allowed in a gigantic refugee camp," said Jan Egeland, Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, warning of a "bloodbath" if Israeli operations expand there.

"Expanded hostilities in Rafah could collapse the humanitarian response," NRC added in a statement.

Reuters has in recent days filmed the funerals of civilians killed in recent days by Israeli strikes.

Israel says it takes steps to avoid harming civilians and accuses Hamas militants of hiding among them, even in shelters - something Hamas denies.

Some 28,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, in a war triggered on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and seized 253 hostages in Israel, according to Israeli tallies.

A doctor who left Gaza last week described Rafah as a "closed jail" with fecal matter running through streets so crowded that there is barely space for medics' vehicles to pass.

"If the same bombs used in Khan Younis were used in Rafah, it would be at least a doubling or tripling of the toll because it's so densely populated," said Dr. Santosh Kumar.

The development charity ActionAid said some people were resorting to eating grass. "Every single person in Gaza is now hungry, and people have just 1.5 to 2 liters of unsafe water per day to meet all their needs," its statement said.

Humanitarian agencies say they cannot move people to safer areas because Israeli troops are positioned to the north, and that the aid that is allowed into the enclave is not nearly enough to go around.

"All our shelters are overflowing and cannot take any more people," said Juliette Touma, spokesperson for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

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Arab World

A Lebanese Family Planning for a Daughter's Wedding is Killed in an Israeli Strike on Their Home

A photo of Reda Gharib’s family, from left: Racha, Nour, Hanan, and Maya Gharib who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their house in al- Housh, in the southern town of Tyre, on September 23 at the onset of the Israeli-Hezbollah war. (AP)
A photo of Reda Gharib’s family, from left: Racha, Nour, Hanan, and Maya Gharib who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their house in al- Housh, in the southern town of Tyre, on September 23 at the onset of the Israeli-Hezbollah war. (AP)
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A Lebanese Family Planning for a Daughter's Wedding is Killed in an Israeli Strike on Their Home

A photo of Reda Gharib’s family, from left: Racha, Nour, Hanan, and Maya Gharib who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their house in al- Housh, in the southern town of Tyre, on September 23 at the onset of the Israeli-Hezbollah war. (AP)
A photo of Reda Gharib’s family, from left: Racha, Nour, Hanan, and Maya Gharib who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their house in al- Housh, in the southern town of Tyre, on September 23 at the onset of the Israeli-Hezbollah war. (AP)

The family WhatsApp group chat buzzed with constant messages. Israel was escalating its airstrikes on villages and towns in southern Lebanon. Everyone was glued to the news.
Reda Gharib woke up uncharacteristically early that day, Sept. 23. Living a continent away in Senegal, he scrolled through videos and pictures shared by his sisters and aunts of explosions around their neighborhood in Tyre, Lebanon’s ancient coastal city.
His aunts decided to leave for Beirut. His father, mother and three sisters had no such plans, The Associated Press reported.
Then his father announced to the group that he had received a call from the Israeli military to evacuate or risk their lives. After that, the chat fell silent. Ten minutes later, Gharib called his father. There was no answer.
The Gharibs’ apartment had been directly hit by an Israeli airstrike. The family had no time to get out. Gharib’s father, Ahmed, a retired Lebanese army officer, his mother, Hanan, and his three sisters were all killed.
“The whole apartment was gone. It is back to bare bones. As if there was nothing there,” said Gharib, speaking from the Senegalese capital, Dakar, where he has been living since 2020.
The Israeli military said it struck a Hezbollah site hiding rocket launchers and missiles.
Gharib said his family had no connection to Hezbollah. The direct hit gutted their apartment, while those above and below suffered only damage, suggesting a specific part of the building was targeted. Gharib said it was his family's home.
The strike was one of more than 1,600 Israel said it carried out on Sept. 23, the first day of an intensified bombardment of Lebanon it has waged for the past month. More than 500 people were killed that day, a casualty figure not observed in Gaza on a single day until the second week, said Emily Tripp, director of London-based Airwars, a conflict monitoring group.
Israel has vowed to cripple Hezbollah to put an end to more than a year of cross-border fire by the Iranian-backed militant group that began the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack triggered the war in Gaza. It says its strikes are targeting Hezbollah’s members and infrastructure. But there are also hundreds of civilians among the more than 2,000 people killed in the bombardment over the past month — often entire families killed in their homes.
Since then, the street where the Gharib family lived — an area of shops, residential buildings and offices of international agencies in Tyre’s al-Housh district — has been battered with repeated airstrikes and is now deserted.
Gharib, 27, a pilot and entrepreneur, moved to Senegal in search of a better future but always planned to return to Lebanon to start a family.
He was close to his three sisters, the keeper of their secrets and best friend, he said. Growing up, their father was often away, so he and his mother took charge of family affairs.
The last time he visited his family was in May 2023, when his sister Maya, an engineering student, got engaged. She had planned to marry on Oct. 12. But as tensions with Israel grew in September, Gharib's plans to come home for the wedding were uncertain. She told him she would put it off until he could get there.
After the strike, her fiancé, also an army officer, found her body and those of the rest of her family in a hospital morgue in Tyre.
“She was not destined to have her wedding. We paraded her as a bride to paradise instead,” Gharib said. On the day the wedding was to have taken place he posted pictures of his sister, including her wedding dress.
His sister Racha, 24, was about to graduate as a dentist and planned to open her own clinic. “She loved life,” he said.
His youngest sister, Nour, 20, was studying to be a dietitian and prepping to be a personal trainer. Gharib called her the “laughter of the house.”
There is nothing left of his family now except for a few pictures on his phone and on social media posts.
“I am so hurt. But I know the hurt will be hardest when I come to Lebanon,” Gharib said. “Not even a picture of them remains hanging on the walls. Their clothes are not there. Their smell is no longer in the house. The house is totally gone."
"They took my family and the memories of them.”