About a million people have fled Rafah in past three weeks, UNRWA says

UNRWA tweeted on Tuesday that there was “nowhere safe to go & amidst bombardments, lack of food & water, piles of waste & unsuitable living conditions” in Rafah. “Day after day, providing assistance & protection becomes nearly impossible,” it continued, and called for an immediate cease-fire.

Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah border crossing in early May, shutting off the flow of aid through a crucial passageand forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee. Israel has since expanded its ground incursion and intensified its bombardment on the area, despite assurances given to the United States of an “operation of limited scope, scale and duration,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at the time.

Despite the international outcry following Sunday’s operation in Rafah, an UNRWA official, Sam Rose, in the city’s Tal al-Sultan neighborhood that was targetted said Israeli operations appeared to have expanded overnight into built-up areas in the west of the city. “They have fired shells into areas way outside the evacuation zone,” Rose told The Washington Post, referring to Israeli tanks. Rose added that a shell had hit a mosque near the refugee agency’s offices in central Rafah.

There was also another lethal overnight strike in the tented encampment next to UNRWA’s logistics base, where the Sunday night strike took place, Rose said.

Gaza’s civil defense crews in Rafah were subjected to three attacks since midnight Tuesday while carrying out their job, the agency said in a statement, adding that bomber planes fired on crews and snipers targeted crew members and an ambulance west of Rafah. Artillery shells were also fired at civil defense members, accompanied by the Palestinian Red Crescent, while trying to retrieve injured people near the Zoroub roundabout.

Mohammad al-Mughair, head of the Civil Defense Equipment Unit, told The Post that more than 25 people were killed overnight and 43 injured - most of them children, women and the elderly.

The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on these reports, but said in a statement Tuesday that it was continuing operations in Rafah, including in the Philadelphi Corridor area, as well as in Jabalya, northern Gaza, and central Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday called the Sunday night strike on Rafah a “tragic accident,” a departure from public Israeli military statements that referred to the strike as “intelligence-based.” But the acknowledgment did little to quell the international furor over the attack.

Martin Griffiths, the United Nations under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief coordinator, emphasized how the attack showed there were no safe havens in Gaza. “Not shelters. Not hospitals. Not the so-called humanitarian zones,” he said in a Monday statement.

“Whether the attack was a war crime or a ‘tragic mistake,’ for the people of Gaza, there is no debate,” his statement continued. “What happened last night was the latest — and possibly most cruel — abomination.”

More than a dozen international nongovernmental organizations also signed a letter calling on all members of the U.N. Security Council to enforce an order Friday by the International Court of Justice for Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah.

Despite the order, the letter said, “the bloodshed has continued, with recent attacks on a displacement camp near UN aid facilities in Rafah reportedly killing dozens of people, including children, and injuring many more.”

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Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter called for sanctions on Israel following a decision to convene an E.U.-Israel council to assess Israel’s compliance with an E.U. agreement that obligates it to respect human rights.

Egypt is investigating a shooting incident in the Rafah border area that killed a member of its security forces on Monday. Israel confirmed a shooting and said it was also investigating. A former Egyptian official told The Washington Post on Monday that details of the incident could be outlined by a joint committee on Tuesday.

At least 36,096 people have been killed and 81,136 injured in Gaza since the war started, said the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and it says 282 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operations in Gaza.

Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Lior Soroka contributed to this report.