2024-02-12 09:05:00
(CNN) — Dozens of people, including children, were killed as a result of “extremely intense” Israeli airstrikes and shelling that hit multiple locations in Rafah overnight on Monday, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, as international alarm grows over the Israel’s planned ground offensive in southern Gaza city.
More than 100 people were killed due to Israeli airstrikes as fighter jets targeted different areas of the city and helicopters fired machine guns along the border areas, the PRCS said Monday morning.
CNN cannot independently verify the number of victims on the ground.
There are fears that the death toll could rise further, as the PRCS said many people are still trapped under the rubble and there is still a strong presence of fighter jets in the skies over Rafah.
The director of the Abu Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital said that the medical facilities in Rafah “cannot handle the large number of wounded due to the shelling of the Israeli occupation.”
Images obtained by CNN showed a chaotic scene inside Rafah’s Al Kuwaiti hospital, with doctors trying to resuscitate a motionless child at one scene. Another image showed doctors treating an injured man on the hospital floor. In another video, a woman was heartbroken as she held the body of a child wrapped in a white cloth.
At least two mosques and around a dozen homes were targeted in the attacks, the Rafah municipality said Monday.
Release of Israeli hostages
The Israeli military confirmed that it carried out a “series of attacks” against what it said were targets in the Shaboura area of Rafah and that two Israeli hostages were rescued in a “special operation.”
In a joint statement, the Israel Defense Forces, the Israel Shin Bet Security Agency and the Police identified the hostages as Fernando Simon Marman, 60, and Louis Har, 70, and said they were kidnapped by Hamas. on October 7 at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.
“Both are in good medical condition and were transferred for a medical examination to Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital,” the statement said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed home the two Argentine-Israeli hostages who were rescued overnight in IDF operations in Rafah.
“Fernando and Luis: welcome back home,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
“I congratulate our brave warriors for the bold action that led to their release. Only the continuation of military pressure, until complete victory, will result in the release of all our hostages,” the prime minister said.
“We will not miss any opportunity to bring them home,” he added.
IDF spokesman Danial Hagari told reporters that the “covert operation” to secure the hostages began at 1:49 a.m. local time, and airstrikes on Rafah were launched a minute later.
In a statement on Monday, Hamas condemned what it called a “horrible massacre” by Israel against civilians in Rafah.
The Israeli army’s attack on Rafah “and its horrific massacres against defenseless civilians and displaced children, women and the elderly… is considered a continuation of the genocidal war and forced displacement attempts it is waging against our Palestinian people,” Hamas said.
More than 1.3 million people – more than half of Gaza’s population – are seeking refuge in Rafah, with most displaced people from other parts of the besieged enclave crammed into a sprawling tent city.
There are serious shortages of food, water, medicine and shelter, and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) spokesperson Jens Laerke has described the city as a “pressure cooker of desperation”.
Rafah has experienced airstrikes by Israeli forces for months, but Monday’s bombing raised fears that an early Israeli ground campaign would result in a bloodbath, with those trapped in the overcrowded city left with no escape route.
“Last bastion”
Netanyahu on Friday ordered the country’s military to plan the “evacuation of the population” of Rafah after saying that the IDF would “soon go to Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas.”
His comments sparked a firestorm of criticism, with Human Rights Watch saying the forced displacement of Palestinians in Rafah would have “catastrophic consequences.” The United Nations said it was “extremely concerned about the fate of civilians in Rafah,” according to U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric, who said people “need to be protected.”
A Hamas leadership source said an attack on Rafah would mean the “destruction” of negotiations that have been ongoing for weeks, according to Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Kingdom joined a growing list of countries expressing concern about Israel’s planned offensive.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry warned of “very serious repercussions of attacking and targeting” the city, while Qatar, a key mediator in talks between Israel and Hamas, urged the UN Security Council on Sunday to “prevent ” for Israel to commit what he described as “genocide” and warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe in the city.”
A satellite image from Maxar Technologies shows Rafah, Gaza, on February 3, 2024. (Credit: Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies)
In a call with Netanyahu this Sunday, US President Joe Biden “reaffirmed” his position that the IDF should not continue the military operation in Rafah “without a credible and executable plan” to ensure the safety of civilians, according to a statement from the White House.
But Netanyahu played down the criticism, saying that telling Israel not to enter the southern Gaza city was like telling the country to lose the war.
“Victory is within our reach. Let’s do it. “We are going to take the remaining terrorist battalions of Hamas to Rafah, which is the last stronghold, but we are going to do it,” Netanyahu told ABC News in an interview this Sunday.
An Israeli official told CNN that Netanyahu wants the Rafah operation to be complete by the start of Ramadan, which is expected to begin in early March.
Netanyahu said Israel would provide safe passage for civilians, but did not provide details on how that would happen. “We are putting together a detailed plan,” he said.
Many Palestinians fleeing Israeli bombs and shelling have traveled through the enclave and taken refuge in the city as the IDF campaign moved south through Gaza.
It has quickly become home to a huge population of displaced Palestinians. Satellite images last week showed how a tent city in Rafah has grown in size in just a few weeks, as more Gazans descend on the area to escape the IDF campaign.
It’s unclear where they might go next; The city borders Egypt to the south, but the border with the country has been closed for months.
“The dead are better off than us”
For the more than one million Palestinians in the southern city, the expected advance toward Rafah is causing alarm and fear.
“We pray to God that what happened in Gaza City does not happen in Rafah because if the same thing happens in Rafah we will have nowhere to go,” said Mohammad Jamal Abu Tour, a Palestinian who lives in Rafah.
“If we go to Gaza City, Khan Younis or El Nuseirat, we will not find the supplies that were provided to us here in Rafah,” he added. “We keep hearing that in Gaza City they cannot find drinking water and that they eat grass, drink from the sea, may God help them.”
Mahmoud Khalil Amer, who was displaced from the Al Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, said he stayed in a tent near a cemetery in Rafah. “We are not alive, the dead are better than us,” he stated.
Rafah is the last major population center in Gaza not occupied by the Israeli army.
Other cities attacked by the IDF in its mission to destroy Hamas have become wastelands – a grim preview of what could lie ahead for Rafah.
People in the Tal El Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City described scenes of “total destruction” following Israeli operations in northern Gaza, with some people saying they had to drink from toilets due to a lack of water.
“We were under siege. We tried to return to the north, but we were besieged here,” Abdul Kareem Al-Qaseer told a journalist working for CNN. “Every day there were martyrs. Every day there were bombings. “Every day there was hunger.”
“We even had to drink water from the bathrooms. We had to drink from it and make our children drink from it. There was no food or drink,” he added.
Olfat Hamdan said he had witnessed dead bodies on the streets of Gaza City and noted that “no one could drag or move them.”
“That I’ve seen? Total destruction – look at the scale of the destruction,” she said in a video commissioned by CNN, as she pointed to the damaged buildings and debris around her.
In the southern city of Khan Younis, where the Israeli army urged large numbers of civilians to flee in the early days of the war, the devastation witnessed by CNN was described as beyond imagination.
Since the IDF focused its campaign on Khan Younis, many buildings have been completely destroyed and the rubble removed with bulldozers. Those left standing appear damaged beyond repair. Some look like the ruins of medieval castles: lonely walls with holes where the windows used to be.
At the center of the growing fears surrounding an Israeli ground offensive in Rafah is the large-scale human cost of a war that has already inflicted a catastrophic humanitarian crisis on the people of Gaza, including famine, imminent famine, a medical disaster and the deaths of more than 28,100 Palestinians, according to information released by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
— CNN’s Martin Goillandeau, Lauren Izso, Alex Stambaugh, Ivana Kottasová, Simon Cullen, Kareem El Damanhoury, Amir Tal, Mick Krever, Eve Brennan, Khader Al Za’anoun and Hamdi Alkhshali contributed reporting.
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