How Brutality "Rafah Has Long Suffered Under Brutal Israeli Assaults
Rafah, one of the last refuges for Palestinians fleeing Israel’s vicious assault on Gaza, is now under intense bombardment. The episode is just the latest chapter in a long history of violence the small border town has suffered at Israel’s hands.
One child plays in the dirt while another lies down in the bright sunlight at the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, January 25, 1973. (UPI / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)
Israel continues to pound Rafah with intensive air strikes, having already killed over one hundred Palestinians, most of them children, and displacing thousands others, who have nowhere safe to go — except perhaps “to the moon,” to cite European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
The Sunday massacres seem to be only a prelude to the horrors to come, as Israel is now gearing up for invading the small refugee town, prompting mounting fears of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Rafah was believed to be Gaza’s last “safe zone,” where 1.5 million Palestinians, nearly two-thirds of the original Gaza’s population, are now taking shelter.
Rafah is a small and dusty city on the southern Gaza border with Egypt. On the eve of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Rafah was home to fewer than 300,000 Palestinians; by early February, the city had swelled to some 1.5 million in population virtually overnight. It now resembles a concentration camp choked with displaced Palestinian families, who are crammed into houses and tents, mostly in tented encampments, some of which encroach on cemeteries. Many are sleeping in the streets.
The city is on the brink of humanitarian calamity. Aid officials have described the Rafah camp as a “pressure cooker of despair.” Aid groups warn of a looming famine there as Israel continues to withhold humanitarian air to Gaza, blocking even flour shipments. Israeli soldiers are filming themselves destroying and burning food warehouses in Gaza to starve Palestinians.
Israel’s brutal assaults on Rafah in fact have a long history, and a stirring one. Over the past seven decades, Rafah has been the tragic site of repeated massacres by Israel and mass displacement.
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