‘There will be massacres’: Palestinians in Rafah speak of their fears
About 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them displaced, are squeezed into the small city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
They have been expelled from their homes in other parts of Gaza during Israel’s assault on the besieged enclave, which has killed more than 28,000 people.
Israel had designated Rafah a “safe zone”, but now, it is threatening a ground invasion, leaving more than a million people trapped there, terrified, with nowhere else to go.
Rafah is the latest in a series of areas that Israel has said would be “safe zones” for civilians to shelter in from what is now four months of attacks, but Israel has attacked one after the other, forcing people out again and again.
There have been international condemnations of Israel’s plan to invade Rafah but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he is determined to continue, claiming that it would “finish Hamas”, which is the declared intent behind the assault on Gaza.
Senior Hamas leaders have said that such a move on Israel’s part would end any possibility of negotiations between the two sides.
Against this backdrop, the fear and panic that has taken hold of people in Rafah continues to build. Al Jazeera spoke to several Palestinians who ended up in Rafah because of the war, some of whom had been displaced many times over.
‘Nowhere else to go’
Umm al-Abed Fayyad said she and her family have been displaced four times so far.
“We are in a different area every month. The last place we were in was Khan Younis, and now we are in Rafah,” she explained.
When asked how she feels about the possibility of an Israeli invasion, Umm al-Abed Fayyad said she has “nowhere else to go”.
