The United States (US) has warned Israel that staging a military offensive into Gaza’s southern city of Rafah without proper planning would be a “disaster”.
Some 1.5 million Palestinians are surviving in the city bordering Egypt in dire humanitarian conditions.
The White House said it would not support major operations without due consideration for the refugees there.
The comments come days after Israel’s leader said the military had been told to prepare to operate in Rafah.
Speaking on Thursday, February 8, evening, and without referring to Rafah, US President Joe Biden said Israel’s actions in Gaza had been “over the top”.
Reported Israeli air strikes on Gaza on Friday killed at least 15 people including eight in Rafah, officials from the Hamas-run health ministry said. Israel did not immediately comment.
Salem El-Rayyes, a freelance journalist living at a camp for displaced people in Rafah, said children were among those killed when an air strike hit a house nearby. Bodies of the victims “flew from the third floor”, he told Reuters.
Most of the people in Rafah have been displaced by fighting from other parts of Gaza and are living in tents.
Garda al-Kourd, a mother-of-two who said she had been displaced six times during the war, said she was expecting an Israeli assault but hoped there would be a ceasefire agreement before it happened.
“If they come to Rafah, it will be the end for us, like we are waiting for death. We have no other place to go,” she told the BBC from a relative’s house in Rafah where she was living with 20 other people.
Emad, 55, a father of six sheltering in Rafah after fleeing his home elsewhere, was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying his greatest fear was a ground assault with nowhere left to run.
“We have our backs to the [border] fence and faces toward the Mediterranean,” he said. “Where should we go?”
Much of northern and central Gaza has been reduced to ruins by sustained Israeli bombardment since the war began on 7 October. (BBC)
