Trapped against fence, Gazans in ‘pressure cooker’ Rafah fear Israeli attack on their last refuge
- More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents camping in Rafah are bracing for an Israeli offensive, with nowhere left to flee
- The United Nations said the prospect of combat reaching Rafah was almost unthinkable, calling the area ‘a pressure cooker of despair’
Israeli forces shelled the outskirts of the last refuge on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on Friday, where the displaced population, penned against the border fence in their hundreds of thousands, feared a new assault with nowhere left to flee.
More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now homeless and crammed into Rafah. Tens of thousands more have arrived in recent days, carrying belongings in their arms and pulling children on carts, since Israeli forces last week launched one of the biggest assaults of the war to capture adjacent Khan Younis, the main southern city.
If the Israeli tanks keep coming, “we will be left with two choices: stay and die or climb the walls into Egypt,” said Emad, 55, a businessman and father of six, reached on a mobile phone chat app.
“Most of Gaza’s population are in Rafah. If the tanks storm in, it will be a massacre like never before during this war.”
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that troops would now “eliminate terror elements” in Rafah, one of the few areas not yet taken in an almost four-month-old assault.
As the only part of Gaza with access to the limited food and medical aid trickling across the border, Rafah and nearby parts of Khan Younis have become a warren of makeshift tents, clogged by winter mud. Wind and cold add to the misery, blowing tents down or flooding them and the ground in-between.