‘No Space for Everyone’: Rafah Overwhelmed with Fleeing Gazans

Internally displaced Palestinians seek refuge inside makeshift shelters in Rafah camp in the southern Gaza Strip, February 02, 2024. (EPA)
Internally displaced Palestinians seek refuge inside makeshift shelters in Rafah camp in the southern Gaza Strip, February 02, 2024. (EPA)
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‘No Space for Everyone’: Rafah Overwhelmed with Fleeing Gazans

Internally displaced Palestinians seek refuge inside makeshift shelters in Rafah camp in the southern Gaza Strip, February 02, 2024. (EPA)
Internally displaced Palestinians seek refuge inside makeshift shelters in Rafah camp in the southern Gaza Strip, February 02, 2024. (EPA)

Tens of thousands of people crammed into a street in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where vast numbers have sought refuge from advancing Israeli ground troops.

"These are the worst months of our lives," said Noha al-Madhun, who fled from the Beit Lahia area of northern Gaza and was taken in by relatives along with some of her children.

"My husband and eldest sons sleep in a tent. There's no space for everyone. We sleep on the floor and we feel the cold" without enough blankets to go round, she said.

"There aren't enough apartments or even places to set up extra tents," added Madhun.

More than half of Gaza's population of 2.4 million is in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, according to the United Nations.

Those without relatives to host them or the means to rent apartments have found themselves in tents wherever there is space: along streets, in public squares, sports stadiums or parks.

Abdulkarim Misbah, 32, said he left his home in the northern Jabalia refugee camp and reached Khan Younis, only to be uprooted once more.

"We escaped last week from death in Khan Younis, without bringing anything with us. We didn't find a place to stay. We slept on the streets the first two nights. The women and children slept in a mosque," he said.

Then they received a donated tent, setting it up right beside the Egyptian border.

"My four children are shivering from the cold. They feel sick and unwell all the time," said Misbah.

Forced to flee south

Most people are concentrated in the city center or west, trying to avoid the eastern edges towards the Israeli border or the north which is dangerously close to fighting in nearby Khan Younis.

After the war erupted on October 7 with Hamas militants' unprecedented attack on Israel, the country's military ordered Gazans to leave their homes in the north.

Those instructions have since expanded, forcing many Palestinians to flee time and again.

Gaza City resident Amjad Abdel Aal, who fled to a school shelter in Rafah, said it took her two hours to be driven a distance which before the war would take just 15 minutes.

"The congestion was awful," she said, waiting in a wheelchair in a long line for donations of blankets and mattresses.

"There aren't a lot of cars because of the fuel shortage. Everyone walks, rides a truck or donkey cart," added the barefoot 28-year-old.

The United Nations estimates 1.7 million have been forced from their homes by the war since October 7.

The Hamas attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Israel's withering offensive has killed at least 27,131 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

'Death is more merciful'

With Egypt's border shut to most Gazans throughout the war, the streets of Rafah have become packed with displaced people.

Mehran Dabbabish, 41, a taxi driver from Khan Younis, said the situation was "getting worse by the day".

"The road between Khan Younis and Rafah used to take 20 to 30 minutes at worst. Today, the shortest trip within Rafah takes an hour and a half to two hours," he told AFP.

The overcrowding is putting a massive strain on everyone and means moving anywhere, by any means, is incredibly difficult.

Another Gazan, Naima al-Bayumi, lamented how tired she was just halfway through a four-hour journey by foot to visit her relative in hospital.

"I rode a donkey cart a few times and fell off because of the intense scramble," she told AFP.

Bayumi started crying as she recounted the bombardment which hit her home, killing her baby twins.

"I gave birth to them in the first week of the war, after 13 years of marriage," said the 38-year-old, who lives in a tent with her husband.

"I don't want to live anymore," she said.

Elsewhere on the road, people helped another woman clamber aboard a truck filled with dozens of passengers.

She clung to the side of the truck with her baby, to stop them falling out, and screamed: "Death is more merciful than this life!"



Gaza Doctors Give their Own Blood to Patients after Scores Gunned Down Seeking Aid

A health-care worker tends to a Palestinian child at Al-Aqsa Hospital.Photograph by Adel Hana / AP
A health-care worker tends to a Palestinian child at Al-Aqsa Hospital.Photograph by Adel Hana / AP
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Gaza Doctors Give their Own Blood to Patients after Scores Gunned Down Seeking Aid

A health-care worker tends to a Palestinian child at Al-Aqsa Hospital.Photograph by Adel Hana / AP
A health-care worker tends to a Palestinian child at Al-Aqsa Hospital.Photograph by Adel Hana / AP

Doctors in the Gaza Strip are donating their own blood to save their patients after scores of Palestinians were gunned down while trying to get food aid, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Thursday.

Around 100 MSF staff protested outside the UN headquarters in Geneva against an aid distribution system in Gaza run by an Israeli-backed private company, which has led to chaotic scenes of mass carnage, Reuters reported.

"People need the basics of life...they also need it in dignity," MSF Switzerland's director general, Stephen Cornish, told Reuters at the protest.

"If you're fearing for your life, running with packages being mowed down, this is just something that is completely beyond everything we've ever seen," he said. "These attacks have killed dozens...They were left to bleed out on the ground."

Cornish said staff at one of the hospitals where MSF operates had to give blood as most Palestinians are now too poorly nourished to donate.

Israel allowed the private Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to begin food distribution in Gaza last week, after having completely shut the Gaza Strip to all supplies since the beginning of March.

Gaza authorities say at least 102 Palestinians were killed and nearly 500 wounded trying to get aid from the food distribution sites in the first eight days.

Eyewitnesses have said Israeli forces fired on crowds. The Israeli military said Hamas militants were to blame for opening fire, though it acknowledged that on Tuesday, when at least 27 people died, that its troops had fired at "suspects" who approached their positions.

The United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Wednesday supported by all other Council members, which would have called for an "immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire" in Gaza and unhindered access for aid.