Hundreds of people braved the roads of Rafah in southern Gaza on Tuesday as they fled Israel's escalating ground attack, with shelling increasing, tanks in the city center and forces positioned on higher ground.
“We are panicked and afraid,” Ihab Zorob, 40, from west Rafah, told AFP.
“Our children and wives have not stopped crying. The bombing last night and throughout the morning has been intense and severe,” he stated.
“Seeing people fleeing has made us more afraid, so we have decided to seek refuge in al-Mawasi. [on the coast]. I hope we find space there.”
Rafah, a city near the Palestinian territory's southern border with Egypt, has been under Israeli ground attack since early May.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said around one million civilians had fled Rafah since the ground attack took place despite a chorus of international warnings.
On Tuesday, AFP journalists saw people carrying as much belongings as they could as they fled Tal as-Sultan, west of Rafah, where an attack on Sunday that Israel said targeted Hamas killed 45 people, according to Palestinian officials.
The luckiest carried piles of mattresses and blankets and dozens of children in the back of trucks, while others carried what they could in garbage bags or walked with mattresses rolled up over their heads.
In the nearby southern town of Khan Younis, AFP journalists saw piles of pillows, mattresses and bags of clothing covering a sandy area where people fleeing Rafah had settled.
Yasser Adwan, a 22-year-old resident of western Rafah, told AFP that “Israeli drones were targeting anyone moving or walking on the streets of Rafah.”
He reported several victims “who were left lying in the street” because civil defense teams could not recover them for fear of being attacked.
Fatima al-Nams, 65, a resident of Rafah, told AFP that “throughout the night, the shelling did not stop, with aerial and artillery fire and vehicles advancing towards the west” of the city.
“Now we will evacuate like other citizens,” added Nams, who as a resident of the last area of the Gaza Strip attacked by ground troops had not yet been displaced, unlike the majority of the territory's population.
