RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have flocked to Rafah, an already overcrowded city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, in recent days, according to the United Nations, fleeing Israeli bombings in the center of the strip, where hospitals stricken dozens on Friday Deaths reported.
The unprecedented Israeli air and ground offensive against Hamas has displaced nearly 85% of the besieged enclave's 2.3 million residents and led to flows of people seeking refuge in areas deemed safe by Israel that have been bombed by the Israeli army. This leaves Palestinians with a disturbing feeling that there are no safe places in the small area.
People came to Rafah in trucks, cars and on foot. Those who can no longer find space in the already overcrowded emergency shelters have set up tents on the side of the road.
“People are using any empty space to build shacks,” said Juliette Touma, communications director for UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. “Some sleep in the car, others sleep outside.”
The escalating Israeli campaign, which has already devastated swathes of northern Gaza, is now focused on the central urban refugee camps of Bureij, Nuseirat and Maghazi, where fighter jets and artillery have destroyed buildings.
But fighting in the north has not subsided and the southern town of Khan Younis, where Israel believes the insurgent group's leaders are hiding, is also a flashpoint of the battle. The militants continue to fire projectiles, mainly towards southern Israel.
The war has already killed more than 21,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and caused a humanitarian crisis that has left a quarter of the population hungry.
Another 187 Palestinians were killed in various parts of the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, Ashraf al-Qidra, spokesman for the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory – whose death toll does not distinguish between civilian casualties and combatants – said on Friday.
Israeli authorities have rejected international calls for a ceasefire, saying it would amount to a victory for Hamas, which they have vowed to disband. He also pledged to bring home more than 100 hostages still held by insurgents since their Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. The Palestinian attack killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
The Israeli army says 168 of its soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began.
ARRIVAL OF CURSED
Around 100,000 people have arrived in Rafah on the border with Egypt in recent days, the United Nations said late Thursday. This means even more people live in one of the Strip's most densely populated areas.
Israel has ordered residents in the center of the enclave to evacuate the area and move to Rafah and the central city of Deir al-Balah. But despite the arrival of displaced people, Rafah has not been freed from the scourge of the Israeli forces.
According to the press office at the nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital, an Israeli attack on Thursday night destroyed a residential building and killed at least 23 people.
Shorouq Abu Oun fled fighting in the north a month ago and took refuge in his sister's house near the site of the attack.
“We were driven out of the north and came here because they (the Israeli army) said it was safe,” Abu Oun said from the hospital where the dead and wounded were transferred. “I wish they had martyred us there (in the north) and we hadn’t come here.”
ATTACKS IN CENTRAL GAZA
Residents said on Friday that many houses had been hit in Nuseirat and Maghazi overnight and reported heavy fighting in Bureij. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah said it received the bodies of 40 people, including 28 women, who were victims of the attacks.
“They attack everywhere,” said Saeed Moustafa in Nuseirat. “They kill families in their homes and on the streets. They kill everywhere.”
Israel announced this week the expansion of its ground offensive into the center of the territory, targeting a belt of crowded neighborhoods built for some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that surrounded Israel's creation.
Israel blames Hamas for the high death toll, accuses it of infiltrating civilians and claims its forces have found caches of weapons and underground tunnels in residential buildings, schools and mosques.
But even its closest ally, the United States, has urged it to take more precautions to avoid civilians and allow more aid. Israel claims that it is warning residents in various ways to leave areas it attacks.
___
Magdy reported from Cairo, Egypt. Associated Press writer Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.