A United Nations team in the Gaza Strip visiting the site for a pier and the staging area for maritime aid operations had to seek shelter in a bunker “for some time” on Wednesday after the area came under fire, a UN spokesperson said on Thursday.
Two rounds landed about 100 metres away, but there were no injuries, and the team was eventually able to continue the tour, Stéphane Dujarric said.
Israel stepped up airstrikes on Rafah overnight, after saying it would evacuate civilians from the southern Gazan city and launch an all-out assault despite allies’ warnings this could cause mass casualties.
Medics in the besieged Palestinian enclave reported five Israeli airstrikes on Rafah early on Thursday that hit at least three houses, killing at least six people, including a local journalist.
“We are afraid of what will happen in Rafah. The level of alert is very high,” Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, told Reuters on Thursday.
“Some are leaving, they are afraid for their families, but where can they go? They are not being allowed to go to the north, and so are confined to a very small area.”
After Israeli missile strikes killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen, some aid groups working in Gaza are halting deliveries because they’re afraid their staff could be next.
In the seventh month of a devastating air and ground war in Gaza, Israeli forces also resumed bombarding northern and central areas of the enclave, as well as east of Khan Younis in the south. Israel’s stated goal is to destroy Hamas, though it is unclear how it would do so.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet was meeting “to discuss how to destroy the last vestiges, the last quarter of Hamas’s battalions, in Rafah and elsewhere,” government spokesperson David Mencer said.
He declined to say when or whether the classified forum might give a green light for a ground operation in Rafah.
Israel has killed at least 34,305 Palestinians since war broke out, Gaza health authorities said on Thursday. The offensive has laid to waste much of the widely urbanized enclave, displacing most of its 2.3 million people and leaving many with little food, water or medical care.
A UN expert speaking after visits to Jordan and Egypt said aid agencies were seeing an increasing number of patients suffering from the acute lack of food in the enclave.
“What I’ve seen here was traumatizing. Patients that previously arrived in Egypt primarily with explosive- and other war-injury-related symptoms are now joined by increasing numbers of patients, often children, with chronic diseases and severe malnutrition,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, told reporters in Cairo.
Israel is retaliating against an Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack that killed some 1,200 people and saw around 253 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies. Iran-backed Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction due to its occupation of Palestinian territories.
Families weigh where to go from Rafah
Escalating Israeli warnings about invading Rafah, the last refuge for around a million civilians who fled Israeli forces further north earlier in the war, have nudged some families to leave for the nearby al-Mawasi coastal area or try to make their way to points further north, residents and witnesses said.
But many were confused over where they should go, saying their experience over the past 200 days of war has taught them that no place is genuinely safe.
Mohammad Nasser, 34, a father of three, said he had left Rafah two weeks ago and now lives in a shelter in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza to avoid being caught by surprise by an Israeli invasion and unable to escape.
“We escape from one trap into another, searching for places Israel calls safe before they bomb us there. It is like the rat and trap game,” he told Reuters via a chat app.
“We are trying to adapt to the new reality, hoping it will become better, but I doubt it will.”
Shaina Low, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said there appeared to be fewer people in Rafah, which borders Egypt. She said teams on the ground had said people expect an invasion after the Jewish Passover holiday ends on April 30.
A senior Israeli defence official said on Wednesday that Israel is poised to evacuate civilians before its attack on Rafah, and has bought 40,000 tents that could house 10 to 12 people each.
