Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands continue to leave Rafahin the southern part of the Gaza Strip, where a large-scale Israeli ground attack is threatened, with the Israeli prime minister declaring that “a humanitarian disaster” had been avoided.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, for his part, said yesterday that the Palestinian Islamist movement, which seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007 and which Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out, “will remain,” and that it, along with the remaining factions, will take decisions “on the post-war governance of Gaza”.
Ismail Haniya added that the future of indirect ceasefire negotiations is uncertain because Israel “insists on holding the Rafah crossing and expanding its offensive” into the Palestinian enclave.
He made the remarks during a speech broadcast live on television after more than seven months of war, on the day Palestinians remember the Nakba, the “Catastrophe,” as they describe the forced mass exodus of the Arab population after the establishment of the state. of Israel in 1948.
Many of the enclave’s residents, who are threatened with famine and have already been repeatedly forcibly displaced since the war broke out between the Israeli army and Hamas, have once again taken to the streets in search of refuge, even though “there is no safe place in Gaza”. , as the UN notes.
Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted for months now that he is determined to order a large-scale ground assault on Rafah, on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt, where he says the “last” ranks of Hamas’ military wing are holed up.
Expressing concern for the fate of the civilian population, the US, like other capitals, emphasizes that it opposes such an operation in the city, which has turned into a vast camp for displaced people.
“Disagreement” with Washington
Benjamin Netanyahu assures that his country’s armed forces prevented the “humanitarian disaster” in Rafah, after “some half a million” Palestinians were “rushed out of the battle zone”.
The Israeli armed forces have been conducting operations in eastern sectors of the city since May 7.
“76 years after the Nakba, Palestinians continue to be forcibly displaced. In the Gaza Strip, 600,000 people left Rafah after military operations intensified,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) underlined.
US President Joe Biden last week threatened to limit military aid to Israel, the US’s main ally in the Middle East, over concerns about the civilian population in Rafah. However, the US government notified Congress yesterday that it will proceed with the delivery of a package of military equipment worth approximately one billion dollars, which will include, in particular, shells for tank guns, to the Israeli armed forces.
In an interview he gave to the American television network CNBC, the Israeli prime minister acknowledged that there is a “disagreement” with the Biden administration regarding Rafa. “But we have to do what we have to do,” he insisted.
The European Union, for its part, called on Israel to “immediately stop” operations at Rafah, warning that otherwise it would put bilateral relations to a “severe test”.
The war in the Gaza Strip is a new Nakba, Gazaios said as he left.
“The Nakba we are living (…) is the worst of all. Much harsher than 1948,” said Mohammed al-Fara, 42, who has already been forced to take his family from their home in Khan Younis (south) to escape shelling and fighting. Much of this city was reduced to ruins.
In the Nakba, approximately 760,000 Arabs in Palestine were forced into exile and sought refuge in neighboring countries or in what gradually became the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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