For many in Rafah, displacement is a recurring nightmare
Less than two weeks after bombs began raining on the Gaza Strip, Ghada al-Kurd arrived in the southern city of Khan Younis. She had already been displaced three times and hoped this would be her last journey to safety.
But three months later, Israeli forces advanced south. Ms al-Kurd, 37, said on the phone that she, her sister, brother-in-law and four cousins had left the tent they had shared “without taking anything with them” and were heading to Rafah, the Gaza area . southernmost city.
Many of the roughly 1.7 million Gazans who U.N. agencies say have been displaced by Israel's brutal bombing and ground invasions have fled repeatedly in the course of a war now in its fifth month. And Ms al-Kurd's relatives are among the more than a million people who have forced their way into Rafah, only to learn that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli army on Friday to draw up plans to establish “combat zones” in the city in advance. evacuate. of an expected ground offensive.
The order, which caused international alarm, is forcing the displaced people sheltering there, along with more than 200,000 Rafah civilians, to consider their next step.
“I regret leaving Gaza City,” said Ms al-Kurd, whose two daughters remained with their father in the north. “If I had stayed home, it would have been better than all the suffering and humiliation of displacement, because every time you flee to a new place you have to start all over again.”
If Israel allows it and the roads are open, she will immediately return to Gaza City, she said, “and that will be my last time running.”
Many others now in Rafah also report repeated displacement. Talaat al-Qaisi said he and his wife had just finished furnishing their new apartment, in Gaza City's upmarket Rimal neighborhood, when their building was bombed on October 10, just days after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel that led to the terrorist act. war.
The family escaped just in time after seeing neighbors running from their own home. “We were barely out of the building when the bombing started on our street,” Mr. al-Qaisi said by phone.
They took shelter in a nearby church, but on October 13 Israel ordered the residents of the north to be evacuated. Mr al-Qaisi and his son walked more than four hours to his sister's apartment in Rafah and sent a car for his wife, who was ill, and the rest of the family. All 10 members of the family, including his seven-month-old grandson, stay in a small one-room apartment in Rafah, he said.
When asked what he would do next, he said: “Planning anything has become futile and pointless,” adding: “The situation continues to exceed our previous predictions” about how much worse it could get.
Mr Al-Qaisi predicted complete chaos if Israeli forces entered Rafah, with people likely running in all directions, not knowing where to go.
“I'm going with the crowd, what else can I do? We have nowhere else to go,” he said. “Other people I spoke to told me they refuse to flee again, even if it means dying in their shelters.”
Mohammed al-Baradie, 24, said the threat of an Israeli advance on Rafah had persuaded him to move again, in his fourth displacement. But his plan to flee to Nuseirat, in central Gaza, was disrupted overnight by heavy shelling, he said.
“Half of the people in Gaza are here in Rafah and they are in the same situation,” he said in a voice message on Saturday. “They don't know where to go.”
Emma Bubola contributed reporting from London.