Hundreds of people braved the roads of Rafah in southern Gaza on Tuesday as they fled Israel’s growing ground assault, with increased shelling, tanks in the city center and forces positioned on higher ground.
“We are panicking and afraid,” Ihab Zorob, 40, from west Rafah, told AFP.
“Our children and our wives have not stopped crying. The shelling last night and throughout the morning was intense and violent,” he said.
“Seeing people fleeing made us even more afraid, which is why we decided to take refuge in al-Mawasi (on the coast). I hope we find room there.
Rafah, a town near the Palestinian territory’s southern border with Egypt, has been under Israeli ground assault since early May.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said around a million civilians had fled Rafah since the ground attack began, despite a series of international warnings.
On Tuesday, AFP journalists saw people carrying what they could as they fled Tal as-Sultan, west of Rafah, where a Sunday strike that Israel said targeted Hamas killed 45 people, according to Palestinian officials.
The more fortunate carried piles of mattresses and blankets and dozens of children in the backs of trucks, while others carried what they could in garbage bags, or walked with mattresses rolled up over their heads.
In the nearby southern town of Khan Younis, AFP journalists saw piles of pillows, mattresses and bags of clothing covering a sandy area where people fleeing Rafah had settled.
Yasser Adwan, a 22-year-old resident of western Rafah, told AFP that “Israeli drones were targeting anyone moving or walking on the streets of Rafah.”
He reported several injured people “abandoned in the street” because civil protection teams were unable to recover them for fear of being targeted themselves.
Fatima al-Nams, 65, a resident of Rafah, told AFP that “all night the shelling did not stop, with aerial and artillery fire and vehicles advancing towards the west” of the city.
“We will now evacuate like other citizens,” added Nams, who, as a resident of the last area of the Gaza Strip attacked by ground troops, had not yet been displaced, unlike most inhabitants of the territory.
