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‘Unlawful and Catastrophic’: IDF Begins Forced Evacuation of Rafah

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip gather their belongings following an evacuation order by the Israeli military on May 6, 2024. (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

The head of one humanitarian group called the Israeli military’s directives “a serious violation of international law.”

Israel’s army on Monday ordered roughly 100,000 people living in eastern Rafah to evacuate ahead of an imminent military assault on the area, terrifying families who have been forcibly displaced to the southern Gaza city in recent months and intensifying warnings of a bloodbath.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dropped leaflets over Rafah ordering some of its 1.4 million residents to move to a strip along Gaza’s coast, a signal that a long-feared ground assault on the overcrowded city is set to begin in the face of vocal opposition from the international community and humanitarian organizations.

The U.S., Israel’s top arms supplier, has said it would oppose a Rafah assault without a credible plan to evacuate civilians from the city. Humanitarian groups and analysts have said such a plan is impossible because there is no genuinely safe place for Gazans to go. Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked so-called “safe zones” and designated routes Palestinians have used to flee in compliance with past IDF orders.

“Israel’s military offensive in Rafah could lead to the deadliest phase of this conflict, inflicting horrific suffering on approximately 1.4 million displaced civilians in the area,” said Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The relocation orders issued by Israel today to thousands of Gazans, directing them to move to Al-Mawasi, are beyond alarming. The area is already overstretched and devoid of vital services. It lacks the capacity to house the number of people currently seeking refuge in Rafah, with no assurances of safety, proper accommodation, or return once hostilities end for those forced to relocate.”

“The absence of these fundamental guarantees of safety and return, as required by international humanitarian law, qualifies Israel’s relocation directives as forcible transfer, amounting to a serious violation of international law,” Egeland said. “Any Israeli military operation in Rafah—which has become the largest cluster of displacement camps in the world—will cause potential mass atrocities.”

“If large-scale military operations start, not only will children be at risk from the violence, but also from chaos and panic, and at a time where their physical and mental states are already weakened.”

Israel reportedly notified the U.S. of the evacuation orders overnight, and CIA Director William Burns is set to arrive in Israel on Monday to discuss the operation in Rafah, a city along Gaza’s border with Egypt that has become a critical point of entry for humanitarian aid. The new evacuation orders, expected to be just the first round of directives, include Rafah’s largest medical facility.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the main relief agency in Gaza, said in response to the IDF’s orders that it would not leave Rafah.

“An Israeli offensive in Rafah would mean more civilian suffering and deaths. The consequences would be devastating for 1.4 million people,” the organization wrote in a social media post. “UNRWA is not evacuating: The agency will maintain a presence in Rafah as long as possible and will continue providing lifesaving aid to people.”

The far-right Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been threatening a ground invasion of Rafah for months, characterizing the city as Hamas’ last major stronghold. Avichay Adraee, an IDF lieutenant colonel, said Monday that the Israeli military would use “extreme force” in the evacuation areas and warned that “anyone who is close to terrorist organizations puts his life and the life of his family at risk.”

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), around 600,000 children are currently sheltering in the city, including many who have been displaced multiple times since Israel’s assault began in October following a Hamas-led attack.

“More than 200 days of war have taken an unimaginable toll on the lives of children,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, said Monday. “Rafah is now a city of children, who have nowhere safe to go in Gaza. If large-scale military operations start, not only will children be at risk from the violence, but also from chaos and panic, and at a time where their physical and mental states are already weakened.”

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, called the IDF’s evacuation push in Rafah “unlawful and catastrophic.”

“There’s nowhere safe to go in Gaza,” Shakir added. “The international community should act to prevent further atrocities.”

The IDF began issuing its evacuation orders in Rafah a day after the Netanyahu government voted to shut down Al Jazeera‘s operations in the country, a brazen attack on press freedom.

“The fact that Israel banned Al Jazeera hours before beginning its assault on Rafah is not a coincidence,” said author and Middle East analyst Assal Rad. “After everything we’ve seen in the last seven months, imagine what they’ll do when they think no one is watching.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Israeli Plan To Evacuate Rafah By Force Sparks Warnings Of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

Continue Reading‘Unlawful and Catastrophic’: IDF Begins Forced Evacuation of Rafah

UN Warns Israeli Ground Invasion Rafah Will Lead to ‘Slaughter of Civilians’

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Palestinians wounded in Israeli attacks on Rafah attempt to collect belongings from bombed-out homes on May 1, 2024 in the southern Gaza city. 
(Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The simplest truth is that a ground operation in Rafah will be nothing short of a tragedy beyond words,” said a top U.N. aid official. “No humanitarian plan can counter that.”

The United Nations’ humanitarian aid agency warned Friday that an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah would put hundreds of thousands of Palestinians “at imminent risk of death.”

“Any ground operation would mean more suffering and death” for the approximately 1.5 million Palestinians—including around 1.2 million people forcibly displaced from other areas of the embattled enclave—sheltering in Gaza’s southernmost city, U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) spokesperson Jens Laerke told reporters in Geneva on Friday.

“The hundreds of thousands of people who are there would be at imminent risk of death if there is an assault,” he added, warning of not only “a slaughter of civilians, but also at the same time an incredible blow to the humanitarian operation in the entire strip, because it is run primarily out of Rafah.”

According to Politico, Israel has shared with the U.S. government its plan to move the civilian population out of Rafah ahead of a looming ground assault the Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Friday could begin next week.

Conditions in Rafah are already dire. The city—which was home to fewer than 300,000 people before the war—is now one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are crowded together in tents and other makeshift shelters. Water and other necessities are in desperately short supply. According to James Elder, the global spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people in Rafah and one shower for every 3,500 people.

“Try to imagine, as a teenage girl, or elderly man, or pregnant woman, queueing for an entire day just to have a shower,” Elder wrote for The Guardian this week.

There are nearly 600,000 children in Rafah, nearly all of whom are “injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities,” UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said Wednesday.

Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, who represents the U.N. World Health Organization in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, on Friday called contingency response plans for a Rafah invasion a “Band-Aid” solution.

“It will absolutely not prevent the expected substantial additional mortality and morbidity caused by a military operation,” he stressed.

Israel’s 210-day assault on Gaza in retaliation for the October 7 attacks has already killed at least 34,622 Palestinians—a large majority of them civilian men, women, and children—while wounding more than 77,800 others, according to Palestinian and international officials. At least 11,000 other Gazans are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of the more than 370,000 homes and other buildings destroyed or damaged during the war.

That means around 5% of Gazans have been killed or wounded during Israel’s onslaught, the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Economic Commission for Western Asia said in a report published Wednesday. The agencies called this an “unprecedented” level of casualties in modern warfare and said it would take until at least 2040 to restore all the homes destroyed or damaged during the war.

As many as 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have also been forcibly displaced by Israeli forces, who despite a January International Court of Justice (ICJ) order to prevent genocidal acts continue to block adequate humanitarian aid from reaching the starving people of Gaza.

Despite pleas and protestations from world leaders including U.S. President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to invade Rafah to “eliminate Hamas’ battalions there.”

Earlier this week, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, specifically mentioning Rafah. The South Africa-led case against Israel at the ICJ has centered similar statements of intent to destroy Palestinians—which are key to proving the crime of genocide—made by Israeli officials since October.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have ramped up aerial attacks on Rafah in what is likely preparation for a ground invasion. Palestinian and international media reported Friday that an overnight Israeli airstrike on a home killed at least eight people, mostly children.

“After almost seven months of brutal hostilities that have killed tens of thousands of people and maimed tens of thousands more, Gaza is bracing for even more suffering and misery,” U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said earlier this week.

“The world has been appealing to the Israeli authorities for weeks to spare Rafah, but a ground operation there is on the immediate horizon,” he continued. “For the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled to Gaza’s southernmost point to escape disease, famine, mass graves, and direct fighting, a ground invasion would spell even more trauma and death.”

“The simplest truth is that a ground operation in Rafah will be nothing short of a tragedy beyond words,” Griffiths added. “No humanitarian plan can counter that. The rest is detail.”

U.S. officials have also privately sounded the alarm over the likely consequences of an Israeli invasion of Rafah.

In March, according to a leaked cable obtained by The Intercept, members of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development warned the State Department that a Rafah invasion “could result in catastrophic humanitarian consequences, including mass civilian casualties, extensive population displacement, and the collapse of the existing humanitarian response.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingUN Warns Israeli Ground Invasion Rafah Will Lead to ‘Slaughter of Civilians’

Nearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah ‘Injured, Sick, Malnourished,’ Says UNICEF

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Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Palestinians, including children, collect remaining belongings from the rubble of destroyed houses after Israeli attacks on May 1, 2024 in Rafah, Gaza.
 (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

A full-scale Israeli assault on the crowded southern Gaza city “would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children.”

“The children in Gaza need a cease-fire.”

That’s how Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), concluded a brief video Wednesday about the harrowing conditions across the Gaza Strip, particularly in Rafah, where about 1.5 million of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million residents have sought refuge from Israel’s devastating assault.

The video was released nearly seven months into Israel’s retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack—which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in Gaza, wounded another 77,816, and left thousands more missing—and as a full-scale Israeli assault of Rafah looms.

The war has already taken “an unimaginable toll,” and a major military operation against the crowded southern Gaza city “would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children,” Russell warned. “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.”

“Many have been displaced multiple times and lost homes, parents, and loved ones,” the UNICEF chief noted. “There is nowhere safe to go in Gaza. Homes throughout the Gaza Strip lie in ruin. Roads are destroyed and the ground littered with unexploded ordnances.”

“Rafah is also the main hub for the humanitarian response, which includes UNICEF, and the city has some of the last functioning healthcare facilities,” she explained.

Israeli forces launched at least 435 attacks on health facilities or personnel during the first six months of the war, and just 10 of the enclave’s 36 hospitals remain partially functional, according to the World Health Organization. As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, thousands of Palestinian child amputees are struggling to recover due to the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system.

“UNICEF continues to call for the protection of all women and children in Rafah and throughout the Gaza Strip—and the protection of the infrastructure, services, and humanitarian aid they rely on,” said Russell. “We repeat our calls for the unconditional release of all hostages in Gaza who need to be home with their children and families. The violence must end.”

The agency’s five core demands for Gaza are:

  1. An immediate and long-lasting humanitarian cease-fire;
  2. Safe and unrestricted humanitarian access;
  3. The immediate, safe, and unconditional release of all abducted children, and an end to any grave violations against all children;
  4. Respect and protection for civilian infrastructure; and
  5. Allow patients with urgent medical cases to safely access critical health services or leave.

As Russell called for peace in video form, James Elder, UNICEF’s global spokesperson, penned a Wednesday opinion piece for The Guardian following his recent trips to Gaza. He began with a startling anecdote:

The war against Gaza’s children is forcing many to close their eyes. Nine-year-old Mohamed’s eyes were forced shut, first by the bandages that covered a gaping hole in the back of his head, and second by the coma caused by the blast that hit his family home. He is nine. Sorry, he was nine. Mohamed is now dead.

“From looming famine to soaring death tolls, the latest fear is the much-threatened offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza,” he wrote. “Can it get any worse? It always seems to.”

“Rafah will implode if it is targeted militarily,” Elder stressed. “Water is in desperately short supply, not just for drinking but sanitation. In Rafah there is approximately one toilet for every 850 people. The situation is four times worse for showers. That is, around one shower for every 3,500 people. Try to imagine, as a teenage girl, or elderly man, or pregnant woman, queueing for an entire day just to have a shower.”

On October 31, just weeks after the start of what the International Court of Justice has since determined is Israel’s plausibly genocidal assault, UNICEF called Gaza a “graveyard” for children.

“Can it get any worse? It always seems to.”

“Last month I saw new graveyards in Rafah being constructed. And filled,” wrote Elder. “Every day the war brings more violent death and destruction. In my 20 years with the United Nations, I have never seen devastation like that I saw in the Gaza Strip cities of Khan Younis and Gaza City. And now we are told to expect the same via an incursion in Rafah.”

Elder recalled that “in the north of the territory, close to where a UNICEF vehicle came under fire last month, a woman clutched my hand and pleaded, over and over, that the world send food, water, and medicine. I will never forget how, as I felt her grasp, I tried to explain we were trying, and she continued to plead.”

“Why? Because she assumed the world did not know what was happening in Gaza. Because if the world knew, how could they possibly let this happen?” he continued. “How, indeed. The world has certainly been warned about Rafah. It remains to be seen how many eyes stay, or are forced, shut.”

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingNearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah ‘Injured, Sick, Malnourished,’ Says UNICEF

Israel is starving Palestinians to death while the world watches

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Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Children waiting for food in Gaza. Photo: UNRWA

Israel has deliberately slowed the flow of aid to Gaza with hundreds of trucks stranded on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border at a time when over two dozen Palestinian children have died of malnutrition

UN agencies have repeatedly condemned Israel’s refusal to expedite the process of aid delivery to Gaza which has been under siege by Israel for nearly six months. This is despite repeated calls for urgency in the context of critical humanitarian conditions which are becoming worse with each passing day.

According to the latest alerts issued by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) on March 18, most of northern Gaza would move into the category five indicating the highest stage of food insecurity or catastrophic levels of hunger. The IPC explains that this would mean that Palestinian households would face “an extreme lack of food and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition.”

The IPC has assessed that the region which continues to face Israeli bombing and ground offensive already faces category four levels of malnutrition with huge gaps between need and actual availability of food.


UNRWA has already confirmed that one in three children in northern Gaza are malnourished. In the last few weeks over 25 children have died due to the same. The situation in other parts of Gaza is approaching similar levels at an alarming speed.

The same day that the IPC released its findings, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, was denied entry to Gaza by Israeli authorities. In a post on X, Lazzarini wrote, “UNRWA has by far the largest presence among all humanitarian organizations in Gaza. My visit today was supposed to coordinate & improve the humanitarian response.”

He added, “This man-made starvation under our watch is a stain on our collective humanity. Too much time was wasted, all land crossings must open now. Famine can be averted with political will.”

The UNRWA head also noted that over 1.1 million people in Gaza facing phase five levels of starvation “is the highest number of people ever recorded as facing catastrophic hunger and is double the number of just three months ago.”

Beth Bechdol, deputy director general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) told Al-Jazeera on Tuesday that, almost half of the total population of Gaza is at the acute level of malnutrition and at the risk of ultimately death.

The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) stated on Sunday that thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza are so malnourished that they do not have enough “energy to cry.”

Over 13,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the Israeli war on Gaza which began on October 7. According to different UN agencies, as many children have been injured and now hundreds of thousands are being forced into starvation by Israel.

UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell had earlier made similar assertions saying that there are “very great bureaucratic challenges” which prevent the humanitarian aid to reach two million Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel has restricted the entry of the aid through land borders using different kinds of excuses, for example presence of scissors in the aid boxes or alleged overcrowding of Palestinians at aid distribution centers among others.

James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson, called the blocking of aid supplies to Gaza “outrageous.” He posted on X showing hundreds of trucks with humanitarian aid stranded at the Rafah border as Israel has not allowed them to enter Gaza.

Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa called for the opening of all crossings. “The world’s inaction is shocking as more children succumb to slow death. All border crossing must open now to allow unfettered access to humanitarian aid” Khodr said in the tweet on Tuesday.

Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingIsrael is starving Palestinians to death while the world watches

Unicef reports that acute malnutrition has doubled in one month in the north of Gaza strip

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1 in 3 children under 2 years of age are today acutely malnourished in the north, according to nutrition screenings conducted by UNICEF and partners

NEW YORK, 15 MARCH 2024 –31 per cent – or 1 in 3 children under 2 years of age – in the Northern Gaza Strip suffer from acute malnutrition, a staggering escalation from 15.6 per cent in January.

Malnutrition among children is spreading fast and reaching devastating and unprecedented levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the war and ongoing restrictions on aid delivery.

At least 23 children in Northern Gaza Strip have reportedly died from malnutrition and dehydration in recent weeks, adding to the mounting toll of children killed in the Strip in this current conflict – about 13,450 reported by the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Nutrition screenings conducted by UNICEF and partners in the north in February found that 4.5 per cent of the children in shelters and health centers suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent therapeutic feeding and treatment, which is not available. The prevalence of acute malnutrition among children under 5 years of age in the north has increased from 13 per cent to as high as 25 per cent.

“The speed at which this catastrophic child malnutrition crisis in Gaza has unfolded is shocking, especially when desperately needed assistance has been at the ready just a few miles away,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director. “We have repeatedly attempted to deliver additional aid and we have repeatedly called for the access challenges we have faced for months to be addressed. Instead, the situation for children is getting worse by each passing day. Our efforts in providing life-saving aid are being hampered by unnecessary restrictions, and those are costing children their lives.”

Screenings conducted for the first time in Khan Younis, in the middle area of the Gaza Strip, found 28 per cent of children under 2 years have acute malnutrition, more than 10 per cent of which have severe wasting.

Even in Rafah, the southern enclave with the most access to aid, the results from screenings among children under 2 years doubled from 5 per cent who were acutely malnourished in January to about 10 per cent by the end of February, with severe wasting rising fourfold from 1 per cent to more than 4 per cent over the month.

UN agencies have been warning of the risk of a famine in the Gaza Strip since December. In January, the emergency thresholds for acute malnutrition in children were exceeded. Acute malnutrition among children has continued to rise rapidly and at scale and there is a high risk it will continue to increase across the Gaza Strip, costing more lives, in the absence of more humanitarian assistance and the restoration of essential services.

UNICEF has reached children with treatment for acute malnutrition, including the use of Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), Ready to Use Infant Formula and preventative micronutrients supplements containing iron and other essential nutrients for pregnant women. More supplies are due to arrive this week, but this is still not enough to address the needs.

“We are doing everything we can to avert a worsening of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but it is not enough,” said Russell. “An immediate humanitarian ceasefire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering. We also need multiple land border crossings that allow aid to be reliably delivered at scale, including to northern Gaza, along with the security assurances and unimpeded passage needed to distribute that aid, without delays or access impediments.”

Continue ReadingUnicef reports that acute malnutrition has doubled in one month in the north of Gaza strip