“My children cling to me while dogs dig up corpses”: the terrifying scenes experienced by Palestinians in Rafah

The seven children of Rehab Abu Daqqa hear dogs growling outside, on the other side of the flimsy plastic of their tent.

Children crowd around their mother. She is the last safe haven in their lives. They experienced things, these children and their mother, that are difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t seen them. Is there a word to express what a child feels when learning that, just a few meters away, animals are dragging a corpse from a grave?

WATCH: “Netanyahu knows Hamas’ survival would mean his defeat”: analysis by Jeremy Bowen, BBC international editor

Childhood vocabulary falls short of the horrors of this emergency cemetery in Rafa.

“Scared” is the word Rehab Abu Daqqa uses.

WARNING: This report contains descriptions that some readers may find disturbing.

The word is precise. But there is something more. Children saw dogs eating corpses. A human leg lying next to a fence. So yes, they are scared. But they also felt disgust and incomprehension. These children, who once had a home, attended school, lived according to the rhythms established by their family and community, are now refugees in a place that smells of death.

“This morning the dogs took a body from one of the graves and ate it,” says Rehab Abu Daqqa. “From dusk until dawn the dogs don’t let us sleep… our children keep clinging to me because they are afraid.”

The dogs arrive in packs of dozens of animals. Domestic pets whose owners are dead or homeless, mixed in with Rafah’s existing population of stray dogs, all of which are now wild and scavenging through trash for what they can eat.

The cemetery has numerous shallow graves where people place their dead until the time comes when they can be taken to their place of origin. At some graves, relatives placed bricks to try to keep dogs away from the bodies.

Rehabilitation Abu Daqqa is emaciated and exhausted. He covers his mouth and nose with a cloth to protect himself from the stench of the graves and thanks the young people who came earlier to rebury a body that the dogs had removed that morning.

Rehabilitation Abu Daqqa and his seven children had to move three times and experienced scenes that were difficult to imagine.

“I cannot accept that my children live near a cemetery. My son is in third grade and today instead of playing he was drawing a grave and in the middle he drew a corpse. he thinks? I can say? Horrible, and the word horrible doesn’t even explain it.

The cemetery is one of the places in Gaza that has become a refuge for those whose homes were destroyed by the Israeli army, which has been carrying out a military campaign in Gaza for months in response to the September 7 Hamas attacks. Israeli territory where 1,200 people died.

In Rafah there are more than 1.4 million people crowded, five times the pre-war population. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, this is equivalent to 22,000 people per square kilometer. Disease is already spreading, with outbreaks of diarrhea, hepatitis A and meningitis, as well as ongoing famine.

Rafah is where Gaza refugees come across the last wall, the border with Egypt that is closed to the vast majority of displaced people and has now been taken over by the Israeli army.

They arrived there pushed by advancing Israeli forces. Rehab Abu Daqqa has already fled three times and will now have to take his family out of there again after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) offensive against Rafah.

Rik Peeperkorn, from the WHO, warns that the offensive in Rafah could worsen the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the military operation in Rafah would be carried out “with or without” a ceasefire to eliminate the four Hamas battalions that, according to him, are hiding in the city. Hamas insists there can be no agreement without a commitment to permanently end the war.

Far-right members of the Israeli coalition government warned Netanyahu not to accept a compromise. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, standard-bearer of the settler movementcalled for “absolute destruction” in Rafahstating that “the work cannot be left half done”.

“Where are they going to move?” [los refugiados]“, asks Rik Peeperkorn, regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO), who recently returned from Rafah.

“There is already a health crisis. There is a water and sanitation crisis, a food crisis. There is a humanitarian disaster that will now get worse… What we can expect is that mortality and disease will increase with the military incursion. Many more people will die… there will be more deaths and much more disease.”

Peeperkorn worked for seven years in Afghanistan with the UN and is not a man who is easily intimidated. But now he looks tired. The tiredness of a man who wakes up every morning with the certainty of a crisis that seems to threaten with increasingly worse consequences.

The WHO is already preparing additional field hospitals in case of further evacuations. But what about the seriously ill and the elderly, the 700 kidney dialysis patients currently being treated at a center that previously served 50?

“If you look at the health sector, it is already badly managed, and the operation will mean that we will lose three more hospitals… which we will not have access to, which could be damaged, could be partially destroyed. preparing yourself with a contingency plan that’s like a Band-Aid.”

Children are among the biggest victims in Gaza.

The BBC provided graphic evidence of conditions inside hospitals where filming was taken day after day during the war. At Rafah European Hospital, families camp in any space they can find, inside and outside. They prepare food in the rooms. Their children wander the dark corridors, among the wounded carried on stretchers.

In the emergency room, 11-year-old Yassin al Ghalban cries in his bed. He was left legless, who were amputated below the knee after an air raid. A family member guarantees that “he survives thanks to the painkillers”.

Yassin al Ghalban, 11, lost his legs in an Israeli air strike.

At the cemetery, Rehab Abu Daqqa watches his children play just meters from the graves. The dogs are gone, but the children stay close to their mother. She will soon move again because she can’t stand her children staying in this place.

There is no talk of hope here. Hope in Gaza disappears at different speeds depending on the circumstances. It can disappear in a second with the murder of a loved one. Or it may fade away, hour by hour, as you are pushed from one miserable field to another, words missing as the children’s questions pile up.

Additional reporting by Alice Doyard and Haneen Abdeen.

Source: Elcomercio