Palestinians stream into a southern Gaza town

A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of a destroyed building after an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip.

By NAJIB JOBAIN, SAMY MAGDY and JACK JEFFERY

Associated Press

Dec. 29, 2023 Updated 4:13 PM PT

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Tens of thousands of Palestinians in recent days have streamed into an already crowded town at the southernmost end of Gaza, according to the United Nations, fleeing Israel’s bombardment of the center of the strip, as a senior official on Friday criticized Israel for continuing to impose “severe restrictions” on access to aid.

The renewed criticism came a week after the U.N. Security Council demanded an immediate increase in humanitarian deliveries to the besieged territory.

Israel’s unprecedented air and ground offensive against Hamas has displaced some 85% of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents, sending swells of people seeking shelter to Israeli-designated safe areas that the country’s military has nevertheless bombed. That has left Palestinians with a harrowing sense that nowhere is safe in the tiny enclave.

Nearly the entire population is fully dependent on outside humanitarian aid, said Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. A quarter of the population is starving because too few trucks enter with food, medicine, fuel and other supplies — sometimes fewer than 100 trucks a day, according to U.N. daily reports.

Drone footage taken Friday showed a vast camp of thousands of tents and makeshift shacks set up on what had been empty land on Rafah’s western outskirts, next to U.N. warehouses. People arrived in Rafah in trucks, in carts and on foot. Those who did not find space in the overwhelmed shelters put up tents on roadsides slick with mud from rain.

With the new arrivals, the town and its surrounding area are packed with some 850,000 people, more than triple the normal population, according to U.N. figures.

“Some are sleeping in their cars, and others are sleeping in the open,” said Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications.

In other developments, South Africa launched a case at the U.N.’s top court accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and asking the court to order the country to halt its attacks. It was the first such challenge made at the court. Israel swiftly rejected the filing “with disgust.”

The two nations have a poor relationship. Many South Africans, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, have compared Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to South Africa’s erstwhile apartheid regime of racial segregation.

Israel’s widening Gaza campaign, which has flattened much of the north, is now focused on the urban refugee camps of Bureij, Nuseirat and Maghazi in central Gaza, where warplanes and artillery have leveled buildings.

But fighting has not abated in the north; similarly, the southern city of Khan Yunis, where Israel believes Hamas’ leaders are hiding, is a smoldering battleground. Militants have continued to fire rockets, mostly at Israel’s south.

The war has killed more than 21,500 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Israeli officials have brushed off international calls for a cease-fire, saying it would amount to a victory for Hamas, which the military has promised to dismantle. It has also vowed to bring back more than 100 hostages still held by the militants after the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war. The assault killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

The military says 168 of its soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began.

The U.N. said late Thursday that around 100,000 people have arrived in Rafah, along the border with Egypt, in recent days. The town and its surrounding region had a prewar population of around 280,000, and the area was already hosting more than 470,000 people driven from their homes by the war.

The new arrivals enter a landscape of misery. Most water is polluted. The sanitation system has broken down, and working toilets are a rarity. Illnesses — rashes, respiratory problems, diarrhea and other intestinal diseases — run rampant among extended families squeezed together in shelters, homes or on the street.

“Everyone here is infected with a disease,” Dalia Abu Samhadana said of her family, who fled the fighting in Khan Yunis this month and now shelter in Rafah’s Shaboura district, in a house with 49 people. Her diet is mainly bread and tea.

Israel has told residents of central Gaza to head south, but even as the displaced have poured in, Rafah has not been spared. A strike Thursday evening destroyed a residential building, killing at least 23 people, according to the media office of the nearby Al-Kuwaiti Hospital.

At the hospital, residents rushed in with a baby, face flecked with dust, who wailed as doctors tore open a Mickey Mouse onesie to check for injuries.

Shorouq Abu Oun had been sheltering at her sister’s house, near the strike. She said her family had fled from the north after the Israeli military said it was safe.

“I wish we were martyred there and didn’t come here,” she said, speaking at the hospital.

Since the start of the war, Israel has halted supplies from entering Gaza except for the trickle of aid from Egypt. This month, Israel began allowing relief trucks to enter through its Kerem Shalom crossing. Israeli officials in recent days blamed the U.N. for delays in delivery, without saying why.

Lazzarini hit back Friday, calling the criticism “baseless” and pointing to “severe restrictions on humanitarian access from the Israeli authorities.”

Trucks at Rafah and Kerem Shalom face long delays, he said, calling on Israel to reduce bureaucratic hurdles. Once in Gaza, distribution of aid is hampered by constant bombardment and fighting, Israeli military checkpoints and repeated cuts in telecommunications, he said. He urged Israel to refrain from attacks near crossing points and convoys and to open safe routes to the north, which has received minimal aid.

In the latest delivery to the north, thousands of Palestinians amassed outside a distribution center in Gaza City as aid trucks arrived. Video footage showed people jumping onto the trucks and clinging to the sides, some throwing packages and cans of food to others on the ground.

Israeli soldiers fired on the aid convoy as it returned from the north along a military-designated route, damaging one vehicle, UNRWA’s Gaza chief, Thomas White, said in a post on X.

Residents said Friday that many houses in Nuseirat and Maghazi had been struck overnight and that heavy fighting took place in Bureij. The al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah said it received the bodies of 40 people, including 28 women, who were killed in strikes.

“They are hitting everywhere,” Saeed Moustafa, a Nuseirat resident, said. “Families are killed inside their homes and the streets. They are killed everywhere.”

Israel blames the death toll on Hamas, which it accuses of positioning fighters and weapons within the civilian population, including in residential buildings, schools and mosques.

In a rare admission, Israel acknowledged making errors in a strike Sunday that killed at least 106 people in the Maghazi camp, hospital records indicate, making it one of the war’s deadliest attacks.

In a preliminary review, the Israeli military said buildings near the target were also hit, and that “likely caused unintended harm to additional uninvolved civilians.”

In a statement, the military said it regretted the harm to civilians and that it would learn from the errors.

Eylon Levy, a government spokesman, told Britain’s Sky News that the wrong munition was used in the strike, leading to “a regrettable mistake.”

Magdy reported from Cairo and Jeffery from London. Associated Press writer Tia Goldenberg contributed to this report from Tel Aviv.