Gaza war: Almost 450,000 people have fled Rafah in a week, UN says
Almost 450,000 Palestinians have fled from Rafah over the past week, the UN says, as Israeli tanks reportedly push deeper into the southern Gaza city.
“People face constant exhaustion, hunger and fear,” warned the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa.
Israel’s military says it is continuing “operations against terror targets” in the east of the city, where more than a million people had been sheltering.
New Israeli operations in northern Gaza have displaced another 100,000 people.
Israeli troops have gone back into the areas of Zeitoun and Jabalia, where the military says Hamas has regrouped only five months after it claimed to have dismantled the group’s local battalions.
The military ordered civilians to evacuate eastern Rafah and Jabalia for their own safety before starting the assaults, but the total of those displaced in recent days is equivalent to almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million population.
Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s cross-border attack on southern Israel on 7 October, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 252 others were taken hostage.
More than 35,170 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 82 in the past 24 hours, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
On Tuesday morning, Unrwa posted several photos showing empty streets in Rafah which were packed with tents and makeshift shelters before the start of the Israeli operation on 6 May.
Families had fled in search of safety, it said, but added: “Nowhere is safe. An immediate ceasefire is the only hope.”
Unrwa spokeswoman Louise Wateridge, who is in Rafah, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that families still in the city had “moved as far west as possible” and had set up tents on beaches along the Mediterranean coast. Further inland was “now a ghost town”, she added.
Read more on BBC
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