‘We don’t know where to go’

Some 1.3 million Palestinian evacuees crammed in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah have nowhere to go as Israeli troops start to battle the remaining battalions of Hamas terrorists holed up there.

“We don’t know where to go,” displaced Palestinian Mohammad al-Jarrah said Saturday, as witnesses reported new strikes early Saturday.

Palestinians displaced from other Gaza towns and cities have flooded into Rafah, where hundreds of thousands are sleeping in tents pushed up against the Egyptian border.

Agence France-Presse images showed scenes of devastation in Rafah’s streets, where people queued for increasingly scarce water.

Rights groups have sounded alarm at the prospect of a ground incursion there.

“Israel’s declared ground offensive on Rafah would be catastrophic and must not proceed,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement. “There is no place that is safe in Gaza and no way for people to leave.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Friday that three children were killed in a strike in Rafah.

“We heard the sound of a huge explosion next to our house... we found two children martyred in the street,” Jaber al-Bardini, 60, said.

“There is no safe place in Rafah. If they storm Rafah we will die in our homes. We have no choice. We don’t want to go anywhere else.”

The Israeli army said its forces had “eliminated 15 terrorists” in the past day in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s biggest city.

Israeli forces raided the city’s Al-Amal Hospital on Friday after a weeks-long siege during which the Palestinian Red Crescent has reported “intense artillery shelling and heavy gunfire.”

The medical organization said Israeli forces had arrested eight of its team members at the hospital, including “four doctors, as well as four wounded individuals and five patients’ companions.”

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has said any Israeli push into Rafah “would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare.”

But Netanyahu’s office said it would be “impossible” to achieve the war’s objective of eliminating Hamas while leaving four of the militants’ battalions in Rafah.

The city is the last major population center in the Gaza Strip that Israeli troops have yet to enter but is also the main point of entry for desperately needed relief supplies.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told military officials on Friday to “submit to the cabinet a combined plan for evacuating the population and destroying the battalions” of Hamas militants holed up in Rafah, his office said.

WITH AFP