The Israeli army leaflets ordering residents of the eastern part of Rafah to leave fell from the sky “at 9:30 in the morning,” estimates Amal, the fake name of a 36-year-old Palestinian, who is still It is not believed that she and her two children, ages 12 and 9, left there alive. Because, according to her story, the leaflets fell on what was her street at the same time as the bombs. “God saved us. It was a miracle that we escaped death, because there was no time to evacuate. I swear that [los israelíes] They didn’t give us time to leave. “They announced the evacuation order and immediately started dropping bombs like crazy on people,” he explains via WhatsApp messages. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNRWA), at least 80,000 Palestinians have fled since Monday from the area of the southern Gaza city that Israel has ordered to evacuate.
Like Amal and her children, who had to escape from their home in the capital of the Palestinian enclave in October, “most of the [personas] uprooted by Israeli military evacuation orders in eastern Rafah had already been displaced from other areas of Gaza,” the United Nations said in a statement this Thursday. These people now leave with everything they can carry “in vehicles, trucks, motorcycles and donkey carts,” according to UNRWA. On Wednesday alone, more than 47,500 Palestinians left their shelters in Rafah, the UN agency estimates.
Israel assured on Monday that its mandate to expel displaced people from that area affected 100,000 people, but, according to other United Nations sources in the town, cited by the newspaper Guardianthose who have left the eastern part of that city already exceed that number, which in the coming days could rise to 300,000 people.
These data do not seem exaggerated. The evacuated area covers 31 square kilometers and the population density in that Palestinian city was 20,000 people per square kilometer, almost double that of New York City, according to Unicef. Before the war, Rafah and its governorate had 220,000 inhabitants, to which more than a million people had been displaced by successive orders of massive population displacement issued by Israel.
From the windows of the warehouse where Amal, her children and her husband had survived since October – her house was destroyed by a bombing – the Rafah crossing could be seen. That border crossing with Egypt has been under the control of Israeli tanks since Tuesday. The evacuation order for the east of the city and the taking of that pass that until now was the main entry route for humanitarian aid have been interpreted as the first steps of the feared Israeli ground offensive on the southern city, which has not yet been has produced, at least on a large scale
San Jorge Street
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The Amal neighborhood of Al Geneina is at the heart of the nine areas of Rafah — Israel has divided Gaza territory into areas — that the country’s army ordered emptied on Monday. Although, until now, the southern city was defined as a “safe zone” by Israel, the army of this country has never stopped bombing this city.
When the leaflets began to fall, Amal and her children did not have time to gather their already meager belongings, since the Israeli planes “immediately began dropping bombs,” she maintains. “I grabbed my children and started running down the street with other people from the shelter. The only thing I was thinking about at that moment was how to keep my children safe from the bombings. We escaped while the bombs fell around us, in the shelters and on the other houses in the area,” she remembers. And then she says: “The evacuation orders are just Israeli propaganda intended for foreign media.”
This Palestinian mentions the name of the street on which these bombings occurred and through which she escaped with her children, along with other displaced people: “Saint Georges” (Saint George). On Monday, the official Palestinian Wafa agency reported shelling in the Al Geneina neighborhood, in which at least four civilians, including two children, were killed, and another airstrike on Saint Georges Street. On that road, at least four other people died, one of whom was another minor. Between Monday afternoon and Wednesday, 109 Palestinians died and 296 were injured in attacks by the Israeli army in Gaza, according to data from the Ministry of Health of the territory governed by Hamas. In the seven months that the fighting has lasted, around 34,900 Palestinians have died in the Strip and another 78,404 have been injured, according to that source.
“We have never experienced terror like this Monday,” says Amal. “I can’t explain what we feel. We were running under shelling for two hours. I can’t believe we’re still alive. “God has saved us.” To them and to his husband, who was left behind when his wife and his children fled, trying to recover “some clothes and blankets to cover the children at night.” After five hours, the man was able to leave the neighborhood. Now, the whole family takes refuge in “an old empty warehouse” on the other side of Rafah.
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