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A U.N. official describes dire conditions for people fleeing Rafah.
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As Israel’s invasion of Rafah stretches into its third week, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the southern Gaza city have encountered miserable conditions in their new encampments and shelters.
Shortages of food, clean water and bathrooms have made the experience of relocating particularly dreadful, Gazans say, and price gouging has made the trip unaffordable for those who need transportation, including older and disabled people.
“We’re dealing with horrific circ*mstances,” said Khalil el-Halabi, a retired U.N. official in his 70s who left Rafah last week for Al-Mawasi, a beachside area that Israel has designated as a “humanitarian zone.”
“We don’t have what we need,” Mr. Halabi said. “We can barely even find water.”
More than 800,000 people have left Rafah in the past two weeks, a United Nations official said on Monday. Israel’s military said the same day that more than 950,000 civilians in the city had relocated since it gave expanded evacuation orders. A military spokesman said about 300,000 to 400,000 civilians remain there.
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The latest wave of displacement in Gaza began on May 6 when Israel sent out evacuation notices and launched military operations in eastern Rafah, which is along the border with Egypt. More than half of the enclave’s civilians had been seeking refuge in the city — most of them after fleeing fighting elsewhere in Gaza multiple times.
Ali Jebril, 27, a wheelchair-bound basketball player, said he and his family paid $600 to have 35 people taken from eastern Rafah to Khan Younis by bus earlier this month.
Mr. Jebril, who said his wheelchair can’t navigate in the sandy beachside areas where many have resettled, has moved to a tent on the grounds of a hospital in Khan Younis.
“We’re not living a dignified life,” he said. “We’re confronting a catastrophe.”
The war, he said, has made him feel that he has become a burden on society, frequently asking others to help him.
Since Israel’s incursions into Rafah, the once overcrowded shelters and tent villages in the city have largely emptied out, Edem Wosornu, an official with the United Nations’ office for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council on Monday. People have moved to areas near Khan Younis and Deir al Balah and set up makeshift camps that lack sanitation, water, drainage or shelter, she said.
“We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth,” Ms. Wosornu said. “It is all of these, and worse.”
Since the beginning of the war in October, three-quarters of Gaza’s population has been displaced, with many people moving four or five times, she said.
Israel has cast the orders as a humanitarian step to protect civilians ahead of further military action, which they say is necessary to root out Hamas fighters in southern Gaza. But aid groups said the additional displacement is worsening an already catastrophic humanitarian situation.
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In its latest update, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs described people living in clusters of 500 to 700 tents, many of them fashioned out of blankets, nylon or whatever other materials were available. Some tents were set up on an unstable beach slope, with waste from higher areas rolling downhill past the dwellings into the sea, according to the report.
Mr. Halabi said that food was available in markets, but that his family was so low on money that paying for it was hard.
“After seven months of war, we barely have anything,” he said.
While an increasing number of commercial trucks have entered Gaza recently, aid coming to the south through the Kerem Shalom and Rafah crossings has come to a near halt. UNRWA, the primary U.N. agency for Palestinian aid, said that in a 16-day period through Tuesday, just 69 aid trucks entered through the two crossings — the lowest rate since the first weeks of the war. And on Tuesday, UNRWA said it had suspended food distribution in Rafah as of May 19, citing in a post on social media a lack of supplies and security, and warned that closures and disruptions at two critical border crossings in southern Gaza had blocked medical supplies from reaching hospitals for the past 10 days.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the chief U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, wrote in a social media post that each relocation comes with risks and takes a heavy toll.
“Every time, they are forced to leave behind the few belongings they have: mattresses, tents, cooking utensils and basic supplies that they cannot carry or pay to transport,” he wrote. “Every time, they have to start from scratch, all over again. ”
Key Developments
UNRWA says aid to Rafah has been suspended, and other news.
The U.N. agency that aids Palestinians said it had suspended food distribution in Rafah, the southern Gazan city from which hundreds of thousands of people have fled as Israel conducts what it has called a limited operation there. The agency, known as UNRWA, cited in a post on social media a lack of supplies and security, and warned that closures and disruptions at two critical border crossings in southern Gaza had blocked medical supplies from reaching hospitals for the past 10 days.
Seven Palestinians, including a 50-year-old doctor, were killed and 19 others were wounded during an Israeli military raid in Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Tuesday morning, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry. It was the latest in a series of near-nightly raids that Israeli officials describe as counterterrorism operations in the West Bank, where over 500 Palestinians have been killed since the war in Gaza began.
France expressed support for the International Criminal Court, taking the opposite stance of the United States and some other allies of Israel, after the court’s chief prosecutor said he would seek arrest warrants for leaders of both Israel and Hamas. “France supports the International Criminal Court, its independence and the fight against impunity in all situations,” the French Foreign Ministry said on Monday. But Stéphane Séjourné, France’s foreign minister, stressed on Tuesday that the warrant requests “must not create an equivalence” between Hamas, which he called a terrorist group, and Israel, which he said was a “democratic state” that must “respect international law.”
Missiles hit the emergency room of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday, the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, told Reuters. Video footage from the news agency showed people evacuating the scene, some wearing white medical coats, others being wheeled out on gurneys. The Israeli military has renewed its offensive in the north, and Kamal Adwan is one of two hospitals in the area that was still partially operational. The other, Al Awda, has been surrounded by fighting for three days, according to its acting director and the World Health Organization.
Pro-Palestinian protesters repeatedly interrupted Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday as he began testifying to a Senate committee. The heckling started as soon as Mr. Blinken entered the hearing room. Demonstrators — some with their hands painted red — called him a “war criminal” and the “secretary of genocide” before the Capitol Police forcibly removed them. Since the war began, Mr. Blinken, who has managed U.S.-Israel relations as the war in Gaza grinds on, has regularly drawn pro-Palestinian protesters at his public appearances, and an encampment even sprang up outside his Northern Virginia home.
Food delivered through the U.S.-built pier in Gaza has not been distributed, Pentagon spokesman says.
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None of the food and supplies that have entered the Gaza Strip through a U.S.-built temporary pier in its first five days of operation have been distributed to Palestinians by aid organizations, Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said at a news briefing on Tuesday.
General Ryder said that 569 metric tons of aid had made it onto Gaza’s shore, but that those supplies had yet to be parceled out by humanitarian organizations.
On Saturday, hungry crowds looted several World Food Program trucks transporting aid that had been delivered through the pier, prompting the agency to suspend deliveries of aid arriving at the pier on Sunday and Monday.
General Ryder also said that after discussions with Israel and the United Nations, alternative routes for the safe movement of staff and cargo had been established. The aid is now being taken to warehouses for further distribution, he said.
“We do anticipate that assistance will be distributed in the coming days, of course, conditions permitting,” he said.
The temporary pier is one of few remaining entry points for aid shipments after Israel’s incursion into Rafah, in southern Gaza, earlier this month. Israel not only seized the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt but also closed the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel. Those were the two main entry points for truck convoys carrying aid overland.
Though Israel has since reopened Kerem Shalom, only 69 trucks have entered Gaza through it in the past two weeks, according to U.N. data. That is far fewer than the number of aid trucks that were entering through the two southern border crossings before Israeli troops went into Rafah. That number peaked at 340 trucks a day.
The 569 metric tons that have arrived at the pier so far are a fraction of the amount of aid that was entering Gaza through land routes before Israel seized the Rafah crossing. The United Nations estimates that trucks carrying food to Gaza have been loaded with roughly 15 to 30 metric tons each.
The pier system, which cost an estimated $300 million, became operational on Thursday, after it was connected to the Mediterranean shore in central Gaza. On Friday, the first trucks of aid began moving ashore. So far, however, the operation has fallen short of its goal of bringing in 90 trucks a day and eventually ramping up to 150 trucks.
General Ryder said that more aid was on the way but that the U.S. military was taking a “crawl, walk, run” approach, working out the logistical hurdles and taking into account security conditions. “So I think you’re going to see as we work together the amount of aid increase, and the ability to get it distributed increase,” he said.
— Gaya Gupta
Newborn babies, doctors and patients are trapped at a hospital in northern Gaza.
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Surrounded by the sound of bombs, with terrified patients huddled far from windows, fuel running low and clean water gone, the acting director of Al Awda Hospital, one of the last hospitals in northern Gaza, said he was grappling with a grim sense of déjà vu.
“Nobody can move, nobody can be close to the windows,” said Dr. Mohammad Salha, the acting director, recalling a weekslong siege at Al Awda in December, when he said three of his colleagues were shot and killed through the windows.
Since Sunday, about 150 people — including doctors, injured patients and infants, two of them born just days ago — have been trapped inside Al Awda, Dr. Salha said, amid a renewed Israeli offensive in the north.
The hospital was effectively besieged by Israeli forces, Dr. Salha said in a phone interview and voice messages. People inside the hospital are unable to leave, outside help cannot reach them and ambulances cannot respond to calls to bring in the injured.
Doctors Without Borders, which has staff members in the area, reported that the hospital was surrounded by tanks on Monday. An emergency medical team deployed at the hospital by the World Health Organization was forced to relocate on May 13 because of “intensified hostilities,” the head of the organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on social media on Tuesday, in an appeal for the protection of the remaining patients and staff.
The Israeli military declined to comment on its military operations around Al Awda.
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The dire conditions at the hospital are part of a pattern that has played out repeatedly across the Gaza Strip over more than seven months of war. Israeli forces have surrounded and raided hospital after hospital, claiming they are being used by Hamas fighters. Israeli soldiers have returned to raid some hospitals a second time in response to what the military said was a resurgent Hamas presence.
In December, Israeli forces surrounded Al Awda Hospital for nearly two weeks, then sent troops inside, killing several people and detaining others for interrogation, according to Doctors Without Borders, whose staff members were among those detained.
The hospital’s director, Dr. Ahmed Muhanna, was one of those taken into Israeli custody and his whereabouts remain unknown, according to ActionAid, a nongovernmental organization that supports the hospital. Dr. Salha has since been leading the hospital staff in his place.
The former head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital, Dr. Adnan Ahmad Albursh, was also detained in December at Al Awda, where he had been working. He died in Israeli custody, Palestinian officials and rights groups said earlier this month.
With no one able to enter or exit Al Awda, the doctors and patients have gathered in interior rooms and corridors in an effort to protect themselves from gunfire and shelling that is hitting the exterior walls, Dr. Salha said.
He said four infants were among those trapped at the hospital — two were delivered by C-section on May 18, and two others are the children of nurses at the hospital.
On Monday, there were roughly three days of fuel left and no clean water, Dr. Salha said. The people trapped inside are “very afraid,” he said.
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The only other major hospital that was still partially functioning in the north, Kamal Adwan, was struck several times on Tuesday, according to witnesses, Gaza health officials and the W.H.O. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strikes.
Like Al Awda, Kamal Adwan was raided by Israeli forces in December, and it has since become a critical facility for treating malnourished children in the north.
Footage from Reuters showed people evacuating the area around the hospital on Tuesday, some wearing white medical coats and others being wheeled out on gurneys. The hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, told the news agency that after the entrance to the emergency department was bombed, missiles kept coming, preventing medics from reaching the victims.
“The situation is catastrophic,” he said.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
— Anushka Patil
Israel says it will return camera it seized from The Associated Press.
Israel’s Communications Ministry confiscated camera equipment from The Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon, claiming the agency had violated a new broadcasting law by providing images of northern Gaza to Al Jazeera.
But hours later, Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, reversed the decision and ordered the equipment be returned to The A.P. It was not clear when the equipment would be given back to the news agency.
The reversal came after the Biden administration expressed major concerns to the Israeli government and demanded the equipment be returned, according to an Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic communications.
The seizure appeared to be an escalation in Israel’s efforts to punish Al Jazeera, the Pan-Arab broadcaster that the Israeli government voted to shut down two weeks ago. It raised questions about how far the Israeli authorities would go to cut off the Qatari-funded channel, which has provided extensive coverage of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
Lauren Easton, The A.P.’s vice president of corporate communications, had denounced the Israeli government’s action, calling it “an abusive use” of a new law that provides the authorities with tools to crack down on foreign news organizations.
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the Communications Ministry said inspectors had gone to a location in southern Israel used by The A.P. to broadcast live footage of the border with northern Gaza, which is several miles away. The ministry claimed that the feed was illegally being carried by Al Jazeera and asserted that it was showing the activities of Israeli soldiers and threatening their lives.
In Mr. Karhi’s evening statement, he said the Defense Ministry had asked to review the issue of broadcasts from Sderot and that he was rescinding his earlier decision to seize the equipment until defense officials made a decision on the matter.
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Israel Confiscates A.P.’s Camera Equipment, Shuts Down Live Feed
Israeli officials claimed The Associated Press had violated a new broadcasting law by providing images of northern Gaza to Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab broadcaster that the government voted to shut down.
Good luck. [microphone disconnects]
The A.P. reported that it adhered to Israel’s military censorship rules, including restrictions on broadcasting troop movements that could put soldiers at risk, and that the feed largely showed smoke rising over Gaza. It said officials had not flagged the positioning of its camera in southern Israel as problematic, but they had noted that its images appeared live on Al Jazeera.
It also reported that the Israeli authorities had conveyed a verbal order last week to shut down the live feed, but it did not comply.
As a prominent wire service, The A.P. makes its content available to subscribers around the world.
Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, had blasted the Communications Ministry for confiscating The A.P.’s equipment, calling the move “insanity.”
“This is not Al Jazeera. This is an American media outlet that has won” dozens of Pulitzer Prizes, he said. “This government is acting as if it decided to ensure at all costs that Israel will be ostracized all around the world.”
In Israel, Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language coverage has frequently come under criticism for amplifying Hamas’s perspective.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other Israeli officials have called the network a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from Gaza that set off the war. That day, Al Jazeera repeatedly reported statements from Hamas officials calling for a violent uprising in the occupied West Bank.
Al Jazeera has said that Israel’s decision to shutter its operations in the country violated “the basic right to access of information.” It has asserted that it hadn’t violated professional news standards.
The Foreign Press Association, which represents Israeli and Palestinian journalists working for international news organizations, had called the seizure of The A.P.’s equipment an “outrageous” decision that prevents the agency from “providing crucial images of northern Gaza to all other media outlets around the world.”
“Israel’s move today is a slippery slope,” it said in a statement on Tuesday. “Israel could block other international news agencies from providing live footage of Gaza. It also could allow Israel to block media coverage of virtually any news event on vague security grounds.”
Under the new law, if the prime minister deems a foreign news outlet was “concretely” undermining Israel’s national security, the government can temporarily close its offices, confiscate its equipment, remove it from Israeli cable and satellite television providers, and block access to any of the channel’s online platforms hosted on servers in Israel or owned by Israeli entities.
Johnatan Reiss and Gaya Gupta contributed reporting.
— Adam Rasgon Reporting from Jerusalem