Gaza: More than 100,000 people have fled Rafah under threat of Israeli attack, UN says

Some 110,000 people have fled the city of Rafah, facing the threat of a large-scale attack from the Israeli army, UN officials said on Friday. They have fled to areas they consider less dangerous in the narrow Palestinian territory.

“About 30,000 people are leaving the city every day,” said the head of the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Gaza Strip, Georgios Petropoulos, adding that “most of these people have already had to move five or six times” since the start of war between Israel and Hamas.

The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) posted the assessment on social media on Thursday.

Early Friday, AFP teams reported Israeli artillery shelling of Rafah on the Egyptian border, as well as witnesses of airstrikes in Gaza City and the Jabaliya strip in the north of the territory.

Residents were urged to evacuate

Earlier this week, the Israeli army confirmed it had launched a “limited-scale operation to temporarily evacuate people living in eastern Rafah.” Israeli forces then estimated the number of casualties at “about 100,000.”

The IDF dropped leaflets saying they were preparing to “take tough action against terrorist organizations” and that anyone who remained “in the area is putting their lives and the lives of their families in danger.”

On Tuesday, the Israeli army sent tanks into Rafah and took control of the border crossing with Egypt, blocking the main passage for aid convoys into the besieged Palestinian territory.

Fears of an Israeli offensive in Rafah are becoming increasingly real as both sides have yet to reach a ceasefire agreement. Representatives of Hamas and Israel left the negotiating table in Cairo on Thursday after “two days of negotiations,” Al-Qahera News reported. In response, Egypt called on both camps to show “flexibility” to reach a truce “as quickly as possible.”