Yesterday, Israeli forces shelled the outskirts of the last refuge on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, where the displaced, hundreds of thousands of them pushed along the border fence, fear a new attack when they will no longer have anywhere to escape.
More than half of Gaza's 2,3 million residents are now homeless and huddled in Rafah. Tens of thousands of them have arrived in recent days, carrying belongings in their arms and dragging children in strollers, since Israeli forces last week launched one of the biggest offensives of the war to capture neighboring Khan Yunis, the southern capital.
If Israeli tanks continue to arrive, "we will be left with two choices: stay and die or climb the walls in Egypt," Emad, 55, a businessman and father of six, told Reuters via a mobile phone app.
“The majority of Gaza's population is in Rafah. If the tanks come in, it will be a massacre like never before during this war."
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said late Thursday that troops would now turn to Rafah, which along with Deir al-Balah north of Khan Yunis is among the last remaining areas untaken in the nearly four-month offensive.
"We are accomplishing our missions in Khan Yunis, and we will also reach Rafah and eliminate the terrorist elements that threaten us," Galant said in a statement.
As the only part of Gaza with access to limited supplies of food and medical aid arriving across the border, Rafah and nearby parts of Khan Yunis have become a maze of makeshift tents. Wind and cold weather worsened the problems, blowing away the tents and filling them with mud, writes Reuters.
"What should we do? We live in multiple miseries, war, hunger, and now rain," said Umm Badri, a mother of five children displaced from Gaza City, who now lives in a tent in Khan Younis.
"We waited for winter, enjoyed watching the rain from the balcony of our house. Now our house is gone, and the rainwater flooded the tent we ended up in."
Telephone service is almost non-existent throughout Gaza, so residents have been climbing to a hill near the border fence and crouching next to barbed wire in the hope of picking up an Egyptian cell phone signal. Mariam Odeh was trying to send a message to the family still in Khan Younis, "to tell them that we are still alive and that we are not martyrs like others".
The United Nations says rescuers can no longer reach the sick and wounded on the battlefield in Khan Younis, and the possibility of the fighting reaching Rafah is almost unthinkable.
"Rafa is a pressure cooker of despair and we are afraid of what comes next," Jens Laerke from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said at a briefing in Geneva.
The war in Gaza was started by Hamas fighters who stormed the border fence into Israel on October 7, killing 1.200 people and taking 253 hostages, according to Israeli data. Since then, according to the health authorities in Gaza, it has been confirmed that more than 27.000 Palestinians have been killed, 112 of them in the past 24 hours, and thousands more bodies are feared to have been left in the ruins, in the Israeli attack that devastated most of the territory.
Mediators are awaiting Hamas's response to a proposal drawn up last week with Israeli and US intelligence chiefs, with participation from Egypt and Qatar, for the first extended ceasefire of the war. The only truce so far lasted only a week at the end of November, when the militants freed 110 women, children and foreign hostages.
The proposal on the table calls for a first phase lasting 40 days, during which Hamas would release the remaining civilian hostages, followed by further phases of freeing soldiers and handing over the bodies of the dead, a Palestinian official said.
However, the parties' positions remain widely divergent on what will come next. Israel says Hamas must be eradicated before it withdraws its troops from Gaza or releases prisoners. Hamas says it will not sign any ceasefire agreement unless Israel agrees to withdraw and end the war.
On another front, Israel's military said its defense system had intercepted a rocket aimed at Israel in the Red Sea area. No group has claimed responsibility, but Iran-linked Yemeni Houthi rebels have repeatedly attacked drones and other targets in the Red Sea with missiles and drones in solidarity with the citizens of Gaza.
The region is also bracing for US strikes against pro-Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. The US authorized the strikes after three US soldiers were killed in a drone attack in Jordan. These were the first American casualties in a wave of violence perpetrated across the region by pro-Iranian groups as the war in Gaza continues.
US officials say the response will consist of several days of strikes. Iran has said it will respond if its territory or interests are attacked.
Since December, several senior commanders in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps who advise the Syrian government have been killed in what are believed to be Israeli airstrikes in Syria. Iran's semi-official media reported yesterday that a Guard adviser was killed in another Israeli attack on Damascus.
UNICEF: Endangered mental health of children
UNICEF said yesterday that it estimated 17.000 children in Gaza were unaccompanied or separated from their families during the conflict, and that almost all children in the enclave were thought to be in need of mental health support.
"They show symptoms such as extremely high levels of anxiety, loss of appetite. They can't sleep, have emotional outbursts or panic every time they hear a bomb attack," said Jonathan Cricks, UNICEF's Head of Communications in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
“Before this war, UNICEF already thought that 500.000 children in Gaza needed mental health and psychosocial support. Today, we estimate that almost all children need this support, which is more than a million children".
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