Israel seem to have made good its threat to enter Rafah home to more than 1.5m Palestoininas with airstrikes Monday afternoon some homes in the Southern Gaza City.
About 26 Palestinians, including eight children, were killed according to medical sources.
Several people were also injured in the attacks that targeted at least 11 houses in the city since Sunday evening, the sources said.
Gaza’s Civil Defense Agency said several people were still missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
The Israeli army issued immediate evacuation orders on Monday for Palestinians in the eastern neighborhoods of Rafah and called on them to move to the town of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. Around 100,000 Palestinian civilians are estimated to be living in the areas to be evacuated, according to Israeli Army Radio.
Palestinian families in eastern Rafah were instructed to flee in preparation for an expected ground assault on the city which abuts Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Residents of Rafah described emerging outside after a terrifying night in which around a dozen air strikes were carried out on Rafah, to find fliers falling from the sky telling them to “evacuate immediately”.
The flier circulated in eastern Rafah showed a map indicating the location to the north of Rafah.
Osama Al-Kahlout, of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Gaza, told AFP that the areas designated for evacuation currently shelter some 250,000 people, many of whom have already been displaced from other areas in the Gaza Strip.
“The evacuation process has begun on the ground, but in a limited manner,” he said.
About 1.2 million people are currently sheltering in Rafah, according to the World Health Organisation, most having fled there during the seven-month war between Israel and Hamas Palestinian militants.
Amid pouring rain, some of those sheltering in Rafah said they had begun packing up their things from the densely packed tents and preparing to leave even before Israel’s directive arrived.
“Whatever happens, my tent is ready,” a resident told AFP.
But others said the area they were being told to flee to was already overcrowded, and they did not trust that it would be safe.
Abdul Rahman Abu Jazar, 36, said he and 12 family members were in the designated evacuation area.
Jazar and his family did not know what to do, he said, because the “humanitarian zone” they were told to head for “does not have enough room for us to make tents because they are (already) full of displaced people”.
“Where can we go? We do not know,” he told AFP.
“There are also no hospitals and it is far from any services many need,” he said, adding that one of his family members relied on dialysis at the Al-Najar hospital, in the area of Rafah instructed to evacuate.
“How will we deal with her after that? Should we watch her die without being able to do anything?”
International aid organisations have voiced alarm at the expected invasion of Rafah.
“From the humanitarian perspective, no credible humanitarian plan for an attack on Rafah exists,” said Bushra Khalidi, advocacy director for Oxfam in the Palestinian territories.
She said she could “not fathom that Rafah will happen”, asking where displaced Palestinians will go “when most of their surroundings have been reduced to death and rubble?” AFP
