Palestinians Ordered By Israel To Flee Rafah Have Nowhere Better To Go

Abood Okal woke up Monday morning to messages that took him back to the start of the devastating Israel-Hamas war ― specifically to Oct. 13, when Israeli jets dropped flyers in northern Gaza telling its more than 1 million residents to flee and he and his family scrambled to leave their homes on short notice.

Okal, his wife and their infant son moved hours away to a house east of Rafah, the town in southern Gaza that has become a refuge for most of the region’s displaced people. They eventually left the Gaza Strip to return to Massachusetts, thanks to their U.S. passports. But Okal’s brother and sister, as well her husband and young children, are stuck at the house where he stayed, and earlier Monday they told him they received new flyers, stating Israel’s demand for Palestinians to flee Rafah, which Israel’s government has threatened for months to invade despite warnings that it would cause a bloodbath.

Okal described familiar “chaos” as he has tried from afar to help his loved ones find safety.

“They packed up what they could, and the men went out to look for a spot” to pitch tents, he told HuffPost. “There’s zero spots.… They may spend the night where they are because there is no place to go.”

Meanwhile, his sister Eman reported “increased bombardment” in the area, including shelling by tanks that sounded like they were targeting her civilian neighborhood. Some of those sheltering with her took what they could carry and just began walking west, Okal said, which reminded her of Palestinians fleeing their historic homes with no plan for their future amid the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

“Everyone is getting up and leaving because now it’s been a few times of this” throughout the war, he said. “Everyone knows in 48-72 hours, things will turn very grim ― if you haven’t left, that’s a blanket excuse for the Israeli army to say, ‘You can’t blame us for carpet-bombing.’”

Israel put a humanitarian spin on its Monday move to expand its U.S.-backed ground invasion of Gaza to Rafah, which it casts as a military necessity to pursue the Palestinian militant group Hamas in retaliation for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people. It said its directive to move affected only about 100,000 people in a limited section of Rafah and that it had designated zones where they would be shielded.

But observers familiar with conditions on the ground say the approach, which President Joe Biden has expressed concern of injury from unexploded Israeli bombs and mines, U.N. experts say.

Once they make the trip out, civilians must contend with a pair of additional problems, one long-standing, the other new.

First is the risk that Israel will choose to strike even its designated humanitarian areas, as it has repeatedly done in Rafah and Al-Mawasi. “Past ‘evacuation’ orders have resulted in serious civilian harm,” wrote Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration official who runs the charity Refugees International, in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “So seeing the same map of ‘safe’ areas from the [Israel Defense Forces, or IDF], and the same calls for people to move to the oft-bombed Mawasi coastal zone, inspires no confidence that the IDF will take civilian safety any more seriously than it has so far.”

The second is the unpredictability of humanitarian assistance.

Rafah was a functioning town before the Israel-Hamas war began. Once fighting was underway, aid workers built their new operations to help Palestinians with features including a water system, and existing markets and medical facilities. In contrast, “there’s almost nothing in Al-Mawasi,” which is largely a sand dune, Ingram said. And Israeli attacks have destroyed much of the infrastructure in Khan Yunis and nearby Deir Al Balah, where some Rafah families have already headed.

As order collapses in Rafah and large numbers of civilians move to more remote areas farther from the entry points for most aid to Gaza, at southern crossings with Egypt and Israel, it will be significantly harder to get civilians help, Ingram told HuffPost.

Major fighting in Rafah means “not only would our ability to bring new supplies into Gaza be impeded, so would our ability to store or access supplies that are already in Gaza,” she said. Most aid warehouses and accommodations for workers are in the town. Additionally, Ingram noted, “the further people are from the aid access points, the harder it has been for humanitarian agencies to reach them, because of damage to roads and infrastructure but also the dangers of traversing the Gaza Strip.”

As Okal fears for his family and hopes that faltering cease-fire talks will bear fruit, he can’t stop thinking about how what he is witnessing seems like “the same story that happened in the north” of Gaza ― the outcome the Biden administration has repeatedly pledged it would not allow.

After months of war, he would have expected “lessons learned” by Israel “to save face.”

“The negligence and the arrogance and the lack of accountability are manifesting themselves into the last neighborhood of the Gaza Strip ― it’s quite shocking,” Okal said.