In the middle of Aid El Fitr, the important Muslim holiday that marks the end of the Sacred Month of Ramadan, the Israeli army has ordered the urgent eviction of almost the entire city of Rafah, where it is estimated that some 50,000 people live, and other adjacent areas in southern Gaza because it prepares to operate there “with intensity”. It is the largest evacuation order in the Palestinian enclave since the 18th day, taking up the forced displacements and intense bombings, which have since caused more than 1,000 dead, after adding 80 in the last 48 hours, according to the balance released on Monday by the health authorities of the Strip. An Israeli military spokesman has ordered the inhabitants of Rafah and surrounding themselves to “immediately” Al Mawasi, the crowded area of tents for displaced, but has bombarded on several occasions, the last last this Monday, which has left two dead.
On the eve, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamín Netanyahu, had realized the decision of the security cabinet of “further increase pressure.” He also described his plan in Gaza: that Hamas surrenders and deliver the weapons, so that Israel “occupies the general security” and “allow the application” of the plan of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, of emptying it from its more than two million Palestinians. His government already maintains longer since the beginning of the war, without food, humanitarian aid, fuel or medicines for almost a month. He has also cut the scarce electricity that he still sold to the Palestinian national authority and that fed the desalination plant.
The evacuation order from the morning the images of exhausted families carrying their belongings, on foot, in vehicles or in cars. In the images of the media with a presence in Gaza – itrael prevents free entry into the press from the beginning of the war, in October 2023, following the Hamas attack – people can be seen escaping from the areas marked by the Israeli army with backpacks, wheelchairs, mattresses, mats, water drums, pans,. The army ensures that it fights again in Rafah “with intensity to eliminate the capacities of terrorist organizations.”
For the Gazatis, it is the nth forced displacement in a year and a half of war, buried the respite of almost two months of truce. In its last data available, the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office (OCHA) estimates that more than 142,000 people have had to escape only in the first six days since the rupture of Alto El Fuego.
20% of the territory
Israel has already issued eviction orders in a fifth of the territory of the strip, not counting the Netzarim corridor (a position that separates north and south and that the troops abandoned in the framework of the high fire and) or the contours in which the soldiers were left. The truce agreement was allowed, signed in January, during the six weeks of its first phase, in which it ended.
Rafah is precisely between the west and east sides of that buffer zone in the contours: between the dividing with Israel and the so -called Filadelphia corridor, the border between Gaza and Egypt that the Israeli army had to have abandoned, by virtue of what he signed in the agreement, but never did.
The new eviction order also has a symbolic component of already seen. A year ago it was the last Gaza without invading area, where most of the more than two million Gazatis had ended up concentrated, after escaping from the north and the center. To reverse in his intention to launch a great offensive in Rafah and until the then president of the United States, Joe Biden, he defined it as a “red line.” In the end, Israel carried out a wide and long operation that Biden ended up blessing, with the argument that it was limited.
