Tel Aviv Tribune Net correspondents
Rafah- He was standing on the edge of the road, contemplating the street, not knowing where to turn, right or left. He was faced with choices, the best of which were bitter. We met the young man Saeed. He did not pay attention to us when we asked him: Why is he standing here? We asked him the question again, and he replied with a sarcastic smile and in his Gazan Palestinian language, “Why is he in another place that I should go to? Why do they let us rest in a place?”
Saeed added, “We were tormented, by God. We came to Rafah and nowhere was it empty. Even the streets were full of people. I stood on the sidewalk trying to find a place to sit.”
Lives in danger
Saeed continued his speech with his distant gaze, “We have been displaced for two months in Nuseirat, and 3 days ago the Israeli occupation told us, ‘Go to Rafah, you are in danger. Our lives are on the street, world. All our lives have become in danger.'”
As for the needy Ghada Al-Banna, she leaned on the car of her son who was displaced with her on the side of the road. With her flowing tears, she spoke to us about her tragedy: “For more than two months, we have been standing in the street, cold and hungry. No one saw us with the eye. We were tired and died from the cold and did not know where to go.”
She continues, “We want the world to stand with us, even for a day, even for an hour. We were in the bridge at a school affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and at least we had a place to shelter us, but today we are suffering in the street, not knowing where or how to sit in the first place.”
The mayor of Rafah, Ahmed Al-Sufi, said – in an interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net – that a large number of residents went to the city of Rafah, which already suffers from a very large population density, noting that the high and enormous numbers of displaced people constituted a great burden on the city and the services it receives, as they cannot Any means of transportation can be easily navigated through its streets due to severe crowding and the presence of displaced persons’ tents on the roads.
Warnings
Al-Sufi stressed that many of the displaced have no shelter other than the street, on the sidewalks and next to the roads, which portends major disasters due to the extreme cold in the winter.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2022, the population of the city of Rafah is 300,000 people, and as a result of the large displacement it has witnessed, more than 300,000 displaced people have taken refuge there, residing in 44 UNRWA schools and 27 government schools, in the headquarters of sports clubs, and in public and private establishments and facilities, in addition to refugees. Thousands to the homes of relatives and friends.
The city of Rafah suffers from a lack of infrastructure and service facilities, which has increased its inability to receive hundreds of thousands of displaced people who live in a deteriorating humanitarian situation.
