The United Nations says more than 100,000 Palestinians have been forced to leave Rafah, amid intensified Israeli strikes on the southern city in Gaza.
“More than 100,000 people have fled Rafah,” Hamish Young, UNICEF’s senior emergency coordinator in the Gaza Strip, said at a briefing in Geneva via video-link from Rafah on Friday.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) also estimated that “around 110,000 people have now fled Rafah looking for safety.”
The agency, however, stressed that “nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip & living conditions are atrocious,” reiterating its call for ceasefire.
“The only hope is an immediate ceasefire,” the UN agency said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
The UNRWA noted that the forced displacement comes as “Israeli Forces bombardment intensifies in Rafah.”
The regime has vowed for weeks to launch a wholesale ground incursion against the city of Rafah, where nearly more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.4 have sought shelter from Israeli strikes elsewhere in Gaza.
The Israeli military has already gone ahead with waging limited ground attacks against the city and seized control of Gaza’s side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, which is the main corridor for the transfer of aid into the besieged strip.
Israel launched the devastating war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed more than 34,900 Palestinians and injured more than 78,000 others.
Source: Press TV
