Jewish Currents Highlights Appalling Conditions in Rafah

In the face of ever-growing world condemnation of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, a new massacre unfolded February 29, resulting in the deaths of 104 Palestinians and injuries to more than 700 others.

“Officials in the Gaza Strip” reported the Washington Post, accused “Israeli forces of opening fire on a crowd of people waiting for humanitarian aid. Israel said an unspecified number of the casualties were caused by a stampede as residents scrambled to reach a convoy of trucks. Israeli forces opened fire on members of the crowd who approached soldiers in a manner deemed threatening, according to Israeli officials.”

The official Palestinian Authority news agency, Wafa, reported that “Israeli tanks had opened fire with machine guns at thousands” waiting for aid to arrive. Gaza’s Health ministry warned that the death toll may rise, the New York Times reported, “as wounded Palestinians arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital, where medical staff were ‘unable to deal with the volume and type of injuries’ amid a lack of medical supplies and staff.”

While there are conflicting accounts of the details, there can be no doubt about the cause of the carnage. It is Israel’s determination to punish the entire population of Gaza for the October 7 assault by Hamas.

As early as October 9, retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland wrote in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” He added, “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.”

In another article, Eiland added: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

In the months since, as the Palestinian death toll has climbed above 30,000, Israel has deprived Gazans of food, water, shelter, adequate medical care, and other necessities. The United Nations (UN) recently warned that at least a quarter of Gaza’s population is “one step away from famine.”

Under these catastrophic conditions, desperate Palestinians often surround the inadequate number of trucks that bring food into Gaza. The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported February 22 that criminal gangs also seek to seize food supplies to sell on the black market. A Gazan who moved to Rafah told Ha’aretz, “The concern is that the more hunger, despair and frustration with aid organizations grow, the more daring the organized gangs become, and the more they sell their loot on the black market at insane prices.”

But this too is made possible by Israeli policies. “Police officers” in Gaza, Amira Hass wrote, “are afraid to protect convoys because wearing a uniform and bearing arms makes them a target for Israeli soldiers.” Reuters reported recently that Ambassador David Satterfield, the U.S. special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, said that Israeli forces had killed Palestinian police protecting a UN aid convoy in Rafah.

Starvation stalking Gaza

Each day the humanitarian crisis created by Israel’s relentless assault grows more dire. This was captured in a February 29 New York Times opinion essay by Megan K. Stack, Starvation is Stalking Gaza’s Children. Excerpts are below.

Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance. The hunger in Gaza is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information. Relief organizations in Gaza struggle to figure out whether the crisis has crossed formally into famine; statistically, the clearest indication is that at least two people out of every 10,000 die every day from starvation. They measure the circumference of children’s upper arms to document the peril of their weight loss.

These children are not suffering from drought or crop failure or some other natural disaster. Their hunger is a man-made catastrophe. The Israeli government has slowed and even prevented food aid from entering the besieged Gaza Strip. Even when trucks do get through, Israeli bombardment and, more recently, the growing desperation of hungry mobs have turned food distribution into an arduous and sometimes deadly endeavor.

The threat of starvation is believed to be most intense in the bomb-scarred remains of northern Gaza, where by January, nutrition screenings found that more than 15 percent of children ages 6 months to 23 months were acutely malnourished, a condition rarely seen in Gaza before the current war. “Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally,” UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. World Food Program said in reporting the latest grim statistics last week.

Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, put it bluntly: “This is a population that is starving to death.”

We should not pretend these deaths were inevitable. All of this we already knew: Palestinian residents of Gaza have been reduced to eating grass. They drink fetid water. Grains meant for animal feed are pulverized into makeshift flour, but even that lowly sustenance has been running out. Palestinian starvation has been documented and reported. We knew.

It is a harsh death. Muscles weaken and shrink. The immune system falters, and infections take hold. Vital organs break down. The weakest die first — babies, the elderly, the sick.

In the early days of its onslaught, Israel’s defense minister declared that food, electricity and fuel would be cut off to Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, nearly half of whom are children. Israel eventually began allowing some food and medical supplies to enter, but aid organizations warned it wasn’t enough.

As international disapproval has mounted, Israeli officials have said there was no shortage of food in Gaza and denied that they were responsible for people going hungry, accusing Hamas of pilfering aid bound for civilians and saying the United Nations failed to distribute food.

But these contentions have been dismissed by aid organizations trying to move supplies into Gaza. Israel has been blamed for creating byzantine delays at crossings and for failing to ensure safe passage in Gaza. It is accused of opening fire on U.N. aid vehicles returning from delivering aid and on crowds waiting for food. Acute hunger only increases the chaos: The World Food Program suspended food deliveries to northern Gaza last week because looters and desperate crowds were attacking the trucks. Jordanian and French military planes dropped food and other supplies into central Gaza on Monday, but some of the boxes fell into the sea, forcing people to scramble into the water to retrieve them.

Stack continued, “To a lesser but important extent, people in Gaza are hungry because the U.S. government — Israel’s pre-eminent military aid provider and political defender — has failed to use its considerable leverage to force Israel to let Gaza eat.”

Washington’s culpability is not “lesser.” It is the ongoing flow of arms and ammunition that fuels Israel’s war. Biden administration complaints about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policies, now reported more frequently in the media, are meaningless in the face of its continued support for Israel’s brutal conduct.

‘Scenes in Rafah straight from a nightmare’

The city of Rafah in southern Gaza is already under bombardment. Israel has threatened a ground invasion if the hostages taken October 7, still held by Hamas and others, are not released by the beginning of Ramadan in March — the month of fasting, prayer, reflection and community observed by Muslims worldwide. This portends further catastrophe in Gaza.

On February 20, Jewish Currents — a magazine of “politics, culture, and ideas” published quarterly in print and daily online — featured an interview with three displaced Palestinians who “describe unlivable conditions in a city bracing for imminent Israeli invasion.”

For the information of our readers, we are republishing it below. The original can be found here, as can information on subscribing to Jewish Currents.

— World-Outlook editors

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“The Scenes in Rafah Are Straight From a Nightmare”

Three displaced Palestinians describe unlivable conditions in a city bracing for imminent Israeli invasion.

By Zak Haniyeh, Ahmed Totah, and Sameera Wafi
as told to Jonathan Shamir

February 20, 2024 — The city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip is ordinarily home to fewer than 300,000 people. But following Israel’s systematic campaign to render northern Gaza uninhabitable and drive its residents to the south, Rafah has become a refuge for over 1.4 million displaced Palestinians—more than half the enclave’s population. Many came to Rafah in a desperate attempt to escape starvation, disease, and relentless Israeli bombardment. “After a terrifying night of bombing [in Khan Younis], we decided to flee to Rafah, which the occupation forces had designated a ‘safe zone,’” Sameera Wafi, a journalist currently sheltering in Rafah, recounts in a dispatch below.

But in Rafah, Palestinians found more of what they were fleeing: cramped and unsanitary living conditions; dire shortages of food, water, clothing, and medicine; and, increasingly, deadly Israeli bombardment. Despite previously designating Rafah as the last safe zone in Gaza, on the night of February 11th Israel conducted heavy airstrikes on the city, killing at least 67 people and destroying 14 homes and three mosques in the span of hours. Israeli officials said these strikes were a “diversion” to enable special forces to rescue two Israeli hostages, but for the Palestinians in Rafah, the bombings were a reprisal of horrors from the north. “We were given no warnings. It was the most difficult hour and a half so far,” Wafi says. And the airstrikes were only the beginning. Israeli troops have converged around the city, awaiting the green light for a full-scale ground invasion.

Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip has already killed at least 29,000 Palestinians in less than five months. An Israeli invasion of Rafah will precipitate an even more extreme humanitarian disaster: In addition to putting over a million displaced civilians in the line of fire, the United Nations’ human rights chief warned, such an invasion would inhibit the trickle of aid currently entering Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, which has been the enclave’s main source of sustenance for months. The scale of the looming crisis has prompted even Western politicians, who have enthusiastically backed Israel’s war, to express their concerns. Yet Israel has vowed to press ahead with the invasion, indicating that troops will enter Rafah in the coming weeks.

Hemmed in by Israeli fire, Palestinians in Rafah have no way to ensure their safety. Some have attempted to flee back to northern areas still under bombardment. Most remain in Rafah, bracing for death and against “the feeling of being left alone to face genocide,” in the words of Zak Haniyeh, a researcher and translator currently trapped in the city. Jewish Currents spoke to Haniyeh, Wafi, and Ahmed Totah, a cook from northern Gaza currently sheltering in Rafah, about their grim odysseys over the past four months, the desperate conditions in the tent city where they’ve taken refuge, and the debilitating toll of the fear, grief, and uncertainty that is their constant reality. These dispatches have been edited for length and clarity.

“Is this the just world order you are always talking about?”

About a month after [October 7th], we suffered a night of pure terror. It was pitch black. Only the bombs, which were constant, lit the skies. Some of our neighbors’ houses were attacked. We didn’t believe that we would live to see the daylight. The next morning, we decided to go. It was a very difficult decision to leave our home, our life, our stuff, our memories—but we had to choose between life and death. We stayed near Al-Shifa Hospital [in Gaza City] for two days, and then we moved further east to my niece’s, where we stayed for four days. We were afraid to go south, but eventually we had no choice. We walked long distances. Israel only permitted each person to carry one small bag across the checkpoint in central Gaza. We saw children and elderly people who could hardly walk, and we saw dead bodies on the side of the road. I came to Khan Younis with my wife, my four boys, my nieces, and their kids, to stay with relatives; then Israel invaded Khan Younis, so we moved to Rafah, where I have been for a little over a month.

Rafah has been relatively quiet compared to the rest of Gaza. But that changed on the night of February 11th: We were woken up at around 1:00 am by the sound of fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and very heavy explosions. We don’t have electricity so we were experiencing this in complete darkness. It was horrible. We didn’t know what was happening. That uncertainty is the most difficult thing: We don’t know what will happen today or tomorrow. My wife and kids left for Ireland in December, but the Israeli authorities blocked me from leaving even though I am also an Irish citizen. I am afraid that I might be killed and that I won’t be able to see them again. When I start thinking that they will grow up without their dad, I want to write something for them—but I don’t want to make them more afraid than they already are.

Throughout the Strip, people are suffering and dying because of the scarcity of medicine and pressure on medical facilities. I have resistant hypertension and I am supposed to take four tablets per day. I only have access to two of them. I have stopped checking my blood pressure. I have given up on going to hospitals; the lines are too long. After my cousin was injured three months ago, he had his leg amputated. The Israelis denied him a medical permit to leave Gaza. He did not receive the right healthcare and he passed away a few days ago. My sister, who was a diabetic, died from hunger and a lack of insulin.

In Gaza, everything is scarce. No one in Rafah has enough clothes, and the clothes we do have are dirty because there is a shortage of water. People can only shower once every two or three weeks. I am staying in a room of 16 square meters with eight other people. It’s unsanitary, and the roof has holes so the rain drips in. Bakeries are not functioning because there is no fuel. Still, people are scared to leave Rafah because the problem is worse elsewhere. In the north, flour is very hard to come by, and it costs ten times the original price. Roads have been wiped away, whole neighborhoods have been leveled. The Israelis haven’t only killed people; they have also intentionally destroyed any prospect for life. They have bombed hospitals, schools, and other civic institutions.

Whether I stay in Gaza or manage to go abroad, how will I live the rest of my life having gone through these experiences? They have been beyond comprehension. I don’t understand how a human being can kill even one child, yet around 12,000 children have been killed. The world is standing by and letting this happen. I wish I could ask the United States government: Is this the just world order you are always talking about? Is this the world we wish to live in as human beings? I have such a deep pain inside of me. The Palestinian people share this feeling—the feeling of being left alone to face genocide.

— Zak Haniyeh, as told to Jonathan Shamir, February 13^th

“If we had the opportunity to go to [a] safe place, we would definitely take it . . . but we do not have that kind of money.”

At the beginning of December, the Israeli army called to inform us that our neighborhood in Khan Younis was considered a combat zone, so we—my mum, my dad, my sisters and their families; 21 of us in total—moved to another sister’s house in a different neighborhood. We were not able to take anything other than a few winter clothes. From there, after a terrifying night of bombing, we decided to flee to Rafah, which the occupation forces had designated a “safe zone.” When we arrived, we couldn’t find food or shelter. We ended up spending the night in the street before returning to the home of relatives in yet another part of Khan Younis. We then received orders to evacuate this neighborhood as well, but before we managed to do so, two of my nieces—three-and-a-half-year-old Dina and eight-year-old Jana—were martyred in a missile strike. May God have mercy on them.

On January 1st, we arrived in Rafah for the second time. We are living in a house with 12 other families. It’s so crowded that you can barely move. It is better than living in tents, some of which sink in the heavy rain or blow away in the strong winds. But we still do not have basic necessities here. Most of the aid that reaches Rafah is being sold at ridiculous prices. Sometimes I have to ask friends to share their food. Families I know have gone days without eating. There are other shortages too. My mother is diabetic and suffers from high blood pressure, but there are very long waiting times at the clinics, and they don’t always have the right medicine. There are also no clothes. People are making their own from sofa fabric, which is being sold at a very high price. Getting around to obtain these items is itself difficult. The streets are flooded with sewage. People often have to walk long distances because there is almost no transportation—and even when there is, very few have the money to use it.

On Sunday night [February 11th], we woke up to the sound of explosions. At first, we thought that Israeli tanks had invaded the city. We were given no warnings. It was the most difficult hour and a half so far. Even though nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip, we are somehow still alive. But if the Israelis do invade Rafah, where will we go? My mother and father are elderly and they cannot walk long distances. If we had the opportunity to go to Egypt, or to any other safe place, we would definitely take it. But the only way to get out is to pay a huge sum to a broker—around $5,000 per person—and we do not have that kind of money. We are afraid of what will happen to us. My message to the world is simple: Stop the war.

— Sameera Wafi, as told to Jonathan Shamir, February 16^th

“Death is all around.”

Since October 7th, I have been displaced three times with my wife and three children—first to Deir al-Balah, then to Khan Younis, and finally to Rafah. These months have been the worst of my life. My son was injured as a baby during the 2008 war; he suffers from severe mental disabilities and requires constant care. When the bombing began, he was so frightened. I had to calm him continuously. It was exhausting.

The scenes in Rafah are straight from a nightmare. There are eight of us living in a single nylon tent on the beach. It is so cold that it is hard to sleep. When it rains, we spend the whole night standing because our tent floods. We are lucky that the sand absorbs the water so at least it dries over time. We eat one meal a day. Most of the [running] water is only fit for cats and dogs. When you get water from an aid agency, it does not go far: People have to share it among their whole families. Most people are buying [bottled] water, if they are able to find it. If you have money, it is sometimes still possible to acquire items on the market, but Gaza has become the most expensive place in the world. A kilogram of vegetables cost 45 shekels [$12.40]. A kilogram of sugar costs 100 shekels [$27.50]. I worked my whole life to build a good home, I took out loans; but my home was destroyed by Israeli bombing. My whole neighborhood was destroyed. It’s all gone. I don’t have a single shekel to my name, and I am still in debt.

It’s hard to complain when people have it worse. Death is all around. People are dying from hunger and ordinary illnesses. If you are injured, you will likely die before receiving care at a hospital. I’ve met people who wish that they would die so they don’t have to endure this horror. I thank God that I still have my wife and children. I don’t care about Palestine any more. I want to leave with my family. There is no future left in the Gaza Strip.

— Ahmed Totah, as told to Jonathan Shamir, February 15th

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