Gaza- “And still, O world, what is in store for us?” (And we do not know yet what fate has in store for us), with these words that are popularly circulated by those who fear what awaits them, the fifty-year-old Palestinian Mithqal Bakr expresses his fears for the coming days, after he landed in the farthest city of Rafah. In the south of the Gaza Strip, he was displaced for the fourth time, since he was forced to evacuate his home in Gaza City.
Bakr lives in a small, dilapidated tent with his family in the Al-Mawasi area, the closest border point to the Strip with Egypt, southwest of the city of Rafah, which now houses about half of the Strip’s population of approximately 2.3 million people.
Estimates by local authorities in Gaza and international organizations indicate that 85% of Gazans have become displaced far from their homes and areas of residence, including about a million Palestinians who took refuge in the city of Rafah, one of whom was Bakr, who was forced to flee repeatedly, in search of lost safety in a small geographical area that did not leave him. The occupation has not targeted a place in it with a missile or shell since the outbreak of war on the seventh of last October.
Al-Mawasi displaced people
Bakr (50 years old) tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net that he was forced to flee for the first time from his home in the Beach refugee camp, west of Gaza City, and he and his family took shelter in Al-Shifa Hospital in the city. As the fighting intensified and the occupation army entered land, Bakr was displaced towards the Bureij refugee camp in the middle of the Strip. From there to the city of Khan Yunis, adjacent to the city of Rafah, where he currently resides in a tent with his family close to the border with Egypt.
This man does not feel safe for himself and his family from a new displacement, but he is not sure where his next destination will be. While he was talking passionately about his deteriorating living reality due to displacement and displacement, one of his children embraced him and asked, “What is the fault of the children in what is happening to us?”
Bakr rejects the idea of leaving the Gaza Strip, and hopes to return to his home in the Beach camp, but at the same time he expresses his fear of Israel’s goals of pushing the displaced people little by little towards the last point in the Gaza Strip, meaning the Al-Mawasi area, and pursuing them with killing and destruction.
While he was stirring a small amount of food and preparing it over a wood fire for his family of 8 people, Bakr said, “By God, my great-grandfather, who died 200 years ago, never lived like this,” meaning that the Israeli war imposed a harsh life on the Gazans.
The displaced Gazan added, “Enough of the humiliation. We were displaced and sold our phones and belongings in order to make a living. We only eat one meal a day, and the child who gets a quarter of a loaf of bread a day praises our Lord.”
Bakr said, “We are dying slowly…displacement, diseases, lack of food, high prices, and the world is watching and does not move to stop the massacre we are being subjected to.”
Official figures issued by the government media office – run by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) – indicate that more than 45% of the victims of Israeli air strikes in the southern Gaza Strip are displaced people, who were forced to evacuate their homes in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip.
No place is safe
Al-Mawasi area extends over 14 kilometers and one kilometer deep along the seashore from the city of Deir al-Balah in the middle of the Gaza Strip, through the city of Khan Yunis to the city of Rafah, where Al-Mawasi is located on an area of 3 square kilometers and is the closest to the border with Egypt.
In this context, Sharif Al-Nairab – a member of a committee that supervises tents funded by an Arab country – told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “The conditions are catastrophic in this region, and aid is not sufficient to meet the growing needs of the successive waves of displaced people in the city of Rafah, especially the western area of the city, which includes Al-Mawasi.”
For his part, the mayor of Rafah, Ahmed Al-Sufi, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “This area lacks infrastructure, except for the main street. The internal streets are not paved, and there is no sanitation or any vital facilities, due to the Israeli siege that was imposed on it until 2005.”
Al-Sufi adds that when the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the fall of 2005, Israeli settlements occupied a large area of the Al-Mawasi area, and any Palestinian development operations in the area were prevented, and simply accessing it and the seashore required passing through Israeli military checkpoints.
The mayor asserts that “there is no safe place in all of the Gaza Strip, including Rafah, which the occupation claims is safe, and does not stop bombing it with aircraft and artillery.”
The number of displaced people in Mawasi Rafah is estimated at about 300,000, out of a million displaced people who took refuge in the city, whose population before the outbreak of war was less than 300,000 people.
miserable life
As far as the eye can see, there are spread in the Al-Mawasi area what look like “tent camps”, some of which were set up by displaced people themselves, while Arab countries are currently financing the establishment of tents to accommodate the increasing numbers of displaced people.
After the Israeli ground attack at the beginning of this month, the city of Khan Yunis faced a massive influx of displaced people into the city of Rafah from residents of the city of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij, al-Maghazi and al-Nuseirat camps in the central Gaza Strip, following Israeli warnings simultaneous with an intensity of air strikes and artillery shelling, and attempts by the occupation army to make a ground incursion.
Thousands of displaced people took refuge in the barren Al-Mawasi area, which is almost devoid of housing and lacks vital services, after the city of Rafah no longer had room for more, and homes, schools, and even streets and public squares were overflowing with the tents of the displaced.
The name Al-Mawasi was highlighted during the second week of the war, when Israel claimed that it was a safe area, and advised the residents of Gaza and its north to go to it, specifically in the “south of the Gaza Valley,” and also announced that humanitarian aid would reach the displaced people who headed there.
The humanitarian aid received from the Rafah crossing with Egypt is not sufficient to cover basic needs, and the displaced are forced to buy a little food at prices that Bakr describes as “crazy, and life is fire.”