Alastair Crooke: Latest news on Rafah genocide & widening war

 

  

Middle East Eye reports this morning:

• Israeli bombs have hit targets in Gaza just 300 metres from the Egyptian border, according to a Sinai-based rights group. The Sinai Foundation said it obtained photos of the aftermath of strikes on civilian facilities in Rafah. Local sources told the organisation that the Israelis struck areas close to the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip as well as areas adjacent to the border fence.

• Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said in a statement that “Israel’s declared ground offensive on Rafah would be catastrophic and must not proceed”. “As aerial bombardment of the area continues, more than a million people, many living in tents and makeshift shelters, now face a dramatic escalation in this ongoing massacre,” it said on X. “Nowhere in Gaza is safe, and repeated forced displacements have pushed people to Rafah, where they are trapped in a tiny patch of land and have no options,” it added. MSF has said that its facilities have come “under fire from tanks, artillery, fighter jets, snipers and ground troops, or being subject to an evacuation order”.

• Israel launched air strikes on Rafah in southern Gaza on Sunday night, killing scores of Palestinians and stoking fears of an imminent offensive on the area densely packed with displaced people. The attacks targeted 14 homes and three mosques in Rafah, Palestinian officials said. Hamas said around 100 people had been killed on the strikes, with the Palestinian health ministry saying at least 67 were slain.
•  Al Jazeera contributor Ahmed Abdullah Mohsen has described the moments Israeli forces launched strikes on Rafah overnight. “The screaming and wailing nearly drowned out the warplanes that covered the sky, dropping barrages in a fiery belt that crushed the bodies of the displaced in their tents. About 20 minutes of explosions lit the night like something from an artificial Hollywood film,” he said. Mohsen said “the displaced and the injured fled en masse to the Kuwaiti Hospital, the only one open in the Shaboura area”. Mohsen said “amidst overwhelming anger and a sense of helplessness, the director of the Kuwaiti Hospital, Dr Suhaib Al-Hams, called out to the world to stop sending medicines to treat COVID, which some countries who want to give the impression they have helped Gaza have done”.

• Thomas White, the Gaza chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), has said the agency has seen alarmingly high rates of diarrhoea, which can be deadly if there is not enough clean water, in addition to outbreaks of hepatitis A. “These are the result of a million people jammed into a pretty small area without access to sanitation,” White said, adding that the conditions in Rafah were grim. “Hundreds of thousands of people are digging a hole in the sand adjacent to where they’re living, and that’s where they are defecating,” he said.

• At least 28,340 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since 7 October according to Gaza’s health ministry. More than 67,984 Palestinians have also been wounded the ministry added.