For Gazans Relocating Once Again, Conditions Are ‘Horrific’ (2024)

A U.N. official describes dire conditions for people fleeing Rafah.

“We don’t have what we need,” Mr. Halabi said. “We can barely even find water.”

More than 800,000 people have left Rafah in the past two weeks, a United Nations official said on Monday. Israel’s military said the same day that more than 950,000 civilians in the city had relocated since it gave expanded evacuation orders. A military spokesman said about 300,000 to 400,000 civilians remain there.

The latest wave of displacement in Gaza began on May 6 when Israel sent out evacuation notices and launched military operations in eastern Rafah, which is along the border with Egypt. More than half of the enclave’s civilians had been seeking refuge in the city — most of them after fleeing fighting elsewhere in Gaza multiple times.

Ali Jebril, 27, a wheelchair-bound basketball player, said he and his family paid $600 to have 35 people taken from eastern Rafah to Khan Younis by bus earlier this month.

Mr. Jebril, who said his wheelchair can’t navigate in the sandy beachside areas where many have resettled, has moved to a tent on the grounds of a hospital in Khan Younis.

“We’re not living a dignified life,” he said. “We’re confronting a catastrophe.”

The war, he said, has made him feel that he has become a burden on society, frequently asking others to help him.

Since Israel’s incursions into Rafah, the once overcrowded shelters and tent villages in the city have largely emptied out, Edem Wosornu, an official with the United Nations’ office for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council on Monday. People have moved to areas near Khan Younis and Deir al Balah and set up makeshift camps that lack sanitation, water, drainage or shelter, she said.

“We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth,” Ms. Wosornu said. “It is all of these, and worse.”

Since the beginning of the war in October, three-quarters of Gaza’s population has been displaced, with many people moving four or five times, she said.

Israel has cast the orders as a humanitarian step to protect civilians ahead of further military action, which they say is necessary to root out Hamas fighters in southern Gaza. But aid groups said the additional displacement is worsening an already catastrophic humanitarian situation.

In its latest update, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs described people living in clusters of 500 to 700 tents, many of them fashioned out of blankets, nylon or whatever other materials were available. Some tents were set up on an unstable beach slope, with waste from higher areas rolling downhill past the dwellings into the sea, according to the report.

Mr. Halabi said that food was available in markets, but that his family was so low on money that paying for it was hard.

“After seven months of war, we barely have anything,” he said.

While an increasing number of commercial trucks have entered Gaza recently, aid coming to the south through the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings has come to a near halt. UNRWA, the primary U.N. agency for Palestinian aid, said that in a 16-day period through Tuesday, just 69 aid trucks entered through the two crossings — the lowest rate since the first weeks of the war. And on Tuesday, UNRWA said it had suspended food distribution in Rafah as of May 19, citing in a post on social media a lack of supplies and security, and warned that closures and disruptions at two critical border crossings in southern Gaza had blocked medical supplies from reaching hospitals for the past 10 days.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the chief U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, wrote in a social media post that each relocation comes with risks and takes a heavy toll.

“Every time, they are forced to leave behind the few belongings they have: mattresses, tents, cooking utensils and basic supplies that they cannot carry or pay to transport,” he wrote. “Every time, they have to start from scratch, all over again. ”

UNRWA says aid to Rafah has been suspended, and other news.

Food delivered through the U.S.-built pier in Gaza has not been distributed, Pentagon spokesman says.

General Ryder also said that after discussions with Israel and the United Nations, alternative routes for the safe movement of staff and cargo had been established. The aid is now being taken to warehouses for further distribution, he said.

“We do anticipate that assistance will be distributed in the coming days, of course, conditions permitting,” he said.

The temporary pier is one of few remaining entry points for aid shipments after Israel’s incursion into Rafah, in southern Gaza, earlier this month. Israel not only seized the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt but also closed the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel. Those were the two main entry points for truck convoys carrying aid overland.

Though Israel has since reopened Kerem Shalom, only 69 trucks have entered Gaza through it in the past two weeks, according to U.N. data. That is far fewer than the number of aid trucks that were entering through the two southern border crossings before Israeli troops went into Rafah. That number peaked at 340 trucks a day.

The 569 metric tons that have arrived at the pier so far are a fraction of the amount of aid that was entering Gaza through land routes before Israel seized the Rafah crossing. The United Nations estimates that trucks carrying food to Gaza have been loaded with roughly 15 to 30 metric tons each.

The pier system, which cost an estimated $300 million, became operational on Thursday, after it was connected to the Mediterranean shore in central Gaza. On Friday, the first trucks of aid began moving ashore. So far, however, the operation has fallen short of its goal of bringing in 90 trucks a day and eventually ramping up to 150 trucks.

General Ryder said that more aid was on the way but that the U.S. military was taking a “crawl, walk, run” approach, working out the logistical hurdles and taking into account security conditions. “So I think you’re going to see as we work together the amount of aid increase, and the ability to get it distributed increase,” he said.

Newborn babies, doctors and patients are trapped at a hospital in northern Gaza.

The hospital was effectively besieged by Israeli forces, Dr. Salha said in a phone interview and voice messages. People inside the hospital are unable to leave, outside help cannot reach them and ambulances cannot respond to calls to bring in the injured.

Doctors Without Borders, which has staff members in the area, reported that the hospital was surrounded by tanks on Monday. An emergency medical team deployed at the hospital by the World Health Organization was forced to relocate on May 13 because of “intensified hostilities,” the head of the organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on social media on Tuesday, in an appeal for the protection of the remaining patients and staff.

The Israeli military declined to comment on its military operations around Al Awda.

The dire conditions at the hospital are part of a pattern that has played out repeatedly across the Gaza Strip over more than seven months of war. Israeli forces have surrounded and raided hospital after hospital, claiming they are being used by Hamas fighters. Israeli soldiers have returned to raid some hospitals a second time in response to what the military said was a resurgent Hamas presence.

In December, Israeli forces surrounded Al Awda Hospital for nearly two weeks, then sent troops inside, killing several people and detaining others for interrogation, according to Doctors Without Borders, whose staff members were among those detained.

The hospital’s director, Dr. Ahmed Muhanna, was one of those taken into Israeli custody and his whereabouts remain unknown, according to ActionAid, a nongovernmental organization that supports the hospital. Dr. Salha has since been leading the hospital staff in his place.

The former head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, Dr. Adnan Ahmad Albursh, was also detained in December at Al Awda, where he had been working. He died in Israeli custody, Palestinian officials and rights groups said earlier this month.

With no one able to enter or exit Al Awda, the doctors and patients have gathered in interior rooms and corridors in an effort to protect themselves from gunfire and shelling that is hitting the exterior walls, Dr. Salha said.

He said four infants were among those trapped at the hospital — two were delivered by C-section on May 18, and two others are the children of nurses at the hospital.

On Monday, there were roughly three days of fuel left and no clean water, Dr. Salha said. The people trapped inside are “very afraid,” he said.

The only other major hospital that was still partially functioning in the north, Kamal Adwan, was struck several times on Tuesday, according to witnesses, Gaza health officials and the W.H.O. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strikes.

Like Al Awda, Kamal Adwan was raided by Israeli forces in December, and it has since become a critical facility for treating malnourished children in the north.

Footage from Reuters showed people evacuating the area around the hospital on Tuesday, some wearing white medical coats and others being wheeled out on gurneys. The hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, told the news agency that after the entrance to the emergency department was bombed, missiles kept coming, preventing medics from reaching the victims.

“The situation is catastrophic,” he said.

Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.

Israel says it will return camera it seized from The Associated Press.

The seizure appeared to be an escalation in Israel’s efforts to punish Al Jazeera, the Pan-Arab broadcaster that the Israeli government voted to shut down two weeks ago. It raised questions about how far the Israeli authorities would go to cut off the Qatari-funded channel, which has provided extensive coverage of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

Lauren Easton, The A.P.’s vice president of corporate communications, had denounced the Israeli government’s action, calling it “an abusive use” of a new law that provides the authorities with tools to crack down on foreign news organizations.

In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the Communications Ministry said inspectors had gone to a location in southern Israel used by The A.P. to broadcast live footage of the border with northern Gaza, which is several miles away. The ministry claimed that the feed was illegally being carried by Al Jazeera and asserted that it was showing the activities of Israeli soldiers and threatening their lives.

In Mr. Karhi’s evening statement, he said the Defense Ministry had asked to review the issue of broadcasts from Sderot and that he was rescinding his earlier decision to seize the equipment until defense officials made a decision on the matter.

The A.P. reported that it adhered to Israel’s military censorship rules, including restrictions on broadcasting troop movements that could put soldiers at risk, and that the feed largely showed smoke rising over Gaza. It said officials had not flagged the positioning of its camera in southern Israel as problematic, but they had noted that its images appeared live on Al Jazeera.

It also reported that the Israeli authorities had conveyed a verbal order last week to shut down the live feed, but it did not comply.

As a prominent wire service, The A.P. makes its content available to subscribers around the world.

Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, had blasted the Communications Ministry for confiscating The A.P.’s equipment, calling the move “insanity.”

“This is not Al Jazeera. This is an American media outlet that has won” dozens of Pulitzer Prizes, he said. “This government is acting as if it decided to ensure at all costs that Israel will be ostracized all around the world.”

In Israel, Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language coverage has frequently come under criticism for amplifying Hamas’s perspective.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other Israeli officials have called the network a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from Gaza that set off the war. That day, Al Jazeera repeatedly reported statements from Hamas officials calling for a violent uprising in the occupied West Bank.

Al Jazeera has said that Israel’s decision to shutter its operations in the country violated “the basic right to access of information.” It has asserted that it hadn’t violated professional news standards.

The Foreign Press Association, which represents Israeli and Palestinian journalists working for international news organizations, had called the seizure of The A.P.’s equipment an “outrageous” decision that prevents the agency from “providing crucial images of northern Gaza to all other media outlets around the world.”

“Israel’s move today is a slippery slope,” it said in a statement on Tuesday. “Israel could block other international news agencies from providing live footage of Gaza. It also could allow Israel to block media coverage of virtually any news event on vague security grounds.”

Under the new law, if the prime minister deems a foreign news outlet was “concretely” undermining Israel’s national security, the government can temporarily close its offices, confiscate its equipment, remove it from Israeli cable and satellite television providers, and block access to any of the channel’s online platforms hosted on servers in Israel or owned by Israeli entities.

Johnatan Reiss and Gaya Gupta contributed reporting.