Occupation and famine besiege 1.5 million Palestinians in the city of Rafah

Long lines of displaced people stand up in the early hours of dawn at the only bakery in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, to get bread for their children, amid worsening living situation in the city, which was crowded with more than a million and a half displaced Palestinians who were forcibly moved out by the Israeli occupation from various parts of the Strip as part of the Israeli continuing aggression for the 125th day.

Muhammad Adwan, a displaced person from the city of Khan Yunis, said: Under the occupation’s bombardment, I travel more than 6 kilometers from the Al-Mawasi area, west of Rafah, to the city center to get bread for my children from the only bakery in the city, amid long lines of displaced people who wait for long hours to get bread so as to support their families. He added: There is great overcrowding in Rafah, tents on the sides of the roads and public squares, food is very scarce, and many of the displaced people and their children are killed by hunger and disease.

According to estimates by the United Nations and human rights organizations, about 75 percent of the people of the Gaza Strip were displaced to the city, and were later targeted by the occupation aircraft and artillery wherever they went, as no safe inch was left in Gaza Strip.

Next to his tent in the Shaboura camp in the city of Rafah, Ali Abu Marahil lit a fire with some plastic bags and paper shreds to cook food for his children, who were exhausted by hunger under the siege and the ongoing machine of killing, destruction and displacement of the Israeli occupation.

Abu Marahil, who was displaced from the Nuseirat camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip, narrates his suffering, which is similar to that of all the people of Gaza Strip, saying: Hunger and cold are killing our children. There is no food. We are unable to provide their daily food in the light of the lack of means of life. Even humanitarian aid, little of which reaches Rafah, is not enough. A day or more passes and we do not have food. The world watches as the occupation, hunger and thirst kill children, women and the elderly in Gaza, without doing anything.
The scene in Rafah is no better than the famine suffered by tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, with the occupation continuing to besiege those areas, bombing United Nations aid convoys and preventing them from arriving for the fifth month in a row.

Muhammad Al-Talouli from Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip recounts the tragedy of hunger, thirst and disease by saying: For more than three months, the people in the camp have run out of flour. We rely on some rice and lentils to survive, and we cook in primitive ways by lighting a fire. The people are struggling to survive through a state of solidarity in the camp that was exposed to a new catastrophe.

Muhammad Khader, a displaced person from the Al-Saftawi neighborhood southwest of the Jabalia camp, who was injured as a result of the aggression, explains that the humanitarian situation west of the camp and north of Gaza City, which includes the neighborhoods of Sheikh Radwan, Al-Karama, and Al-Nasr, is horrific. The occupation destroyed all those areas and, after bombing them it bulldozed them. All means of life for the people in those areas were cut off.

Stories of death, massacres, hunger and thirst have been spread everywhere in Gaza Strip due to the occupation and aggression. thousands of families, who survived the barbaric bombing, are now being destroyed by hunger and thirst, while the world that claims humanity and the preservation of human rights finds itself unable to stop the occupation’s crimes against the Palestinian people, because of the support of the US and the Western colonial forces to the Nazis in the war of genocide the Israeli occupation is waging on the Palestinian people.

NR