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The Israeli military has ordered residents in more areas of eastern and central Rafah to evacuate as it expands its offensive in the southernmost corner of the Gaza Strip, again displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians.
An estimated 150,000 Palestinians, many displaced multiple times, have now fled Rafah, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on Saturday. Israel put that figure at about 300,000.
Earlier on Saturday, the Israeli army said in a statement that “approximately 300,000 Gazans” had moved from the eastern part of Rafah to al-Mawasi since the order was issued on Monday.
Israel claims al-Mawasi, on Gaza’s western coast, is a “safe humanitarian zone”. But humanitarian groups and displaced Palestinians say tens of thousands of people are crammed into the area, and are facing severe food and water shortages, as well as periodic bombardments.
Georgios Petropoulos, an official with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Rafah, told The Associated Press news agency that humanitarian workers had no supplies to help them set up in new locations and accommodate the tens of thousands of new people from Rafah.
“We simply have no tents, we have no blankets, no bedding, none of the items that you would expect a population on the move to be able to get from the humanitarian system,” he said.
The Israeli army has claimed what it called a “temporary evacuation” was being communicated to people through leaflets, mobile text messages, phone calls and broadcasts in Arabic. But it is unclear how many people received the order.
The military initially ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah on Monday as it seized control of the crossing with the Egyptian border before its long-threatened ground assault in the city where about 1.4 million displaced people were sheltering.
Israeli tanks captured the main road dividing Rafah’s eastern and western sections on Friday, effectively encircling the eastern side of the city.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Saturday that at least 34,971 people have been killed and 78,641 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. The revised death toll in Israel from Hamas’s October 7 attacks stands at 1,139 with dozens of people still held captive.
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