Middle East crisis live: large parts of Rafah now a ‘ghost town’, says Unrwa spokesperson | Israel-Gaza war

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said that it had been “forced to stop providing healthcare at Rafah Indonesian Field hospital” as of Sunday.

“MSF has seen a pattern of systematic attacks against medical facilities and civilian infrastructure since the beginning of the war. In light of this, as well as the advancing offensive, we have made the decision to leave Rafah Indonesian Field hospital,” the medical NGO said.

It said the 22 patients who remained at the hospital have been referred to other facilities as MSF can “no longer guarantee their safety”.

According to the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, 24 out of the 36 hospitals in Gaza are now out of service.

The fighting has forced many big aid organisations to shut down or cut operations across Gaza, amid increasingly acute shortages of fuel, food and clean water.

Health officials said they had received a consignment of emergency fuel and that healthcare was being prioritised over other services, meaning the few remaining hospitals in Rafah have a enough fuel to maintain reduced services for about six days.

Michel-Olivier Lacharité, MSF’s head of emergency operations, said:

We have had to leave 12 different health structures and have endured 26 violent incidents, which include airstrikes damaging hospitals, tanks being fired at agreed deconflicted shelters, ground offensives into medical centres, and convoys fired upon.

MSF staff were forced to flee Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in February after a shell struck the orthopaedic department and Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of the facility before raiding it, the charity said in its press release.

A spokesperson for the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Louise Wateridge, who is in Rafah, has said that families still in the southern city had “moved as far west as possible”, describing inland in the city as a “ghost town”.

“It’s hard to believe there were over 1 million people sheltering here just a week ago,” Wateridge wrote in a post on X.

Between 360,000 and 500,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah in the past week after Israeli warnings to evacuate eastern and central neighbourhoods before assaults that look set to open a bloody new phase of the war.

In the north of the territory, where Israeli troops launched a series of operations over the weekend, there were reports of the most intense battles for many weeks, forcing another 100,000 to flee after receiving instructions from the Israeli military.

Al-Mawasi, in the “extended humanitarian zone” designated by Israel as a destination for those told to evacuate Rafah and elsewhere, has limited sanitation, minimal water supplies and inadequate food, displaced people there have said.

The UK’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, said attacks on aid convoys headed for Gaza were “appalling” and that Israel must hold those responsible to account.

Cameron wrote in a post on X:

Attacks by extremists on aid convoys en route to Gaza are appalling. Gazans are at risk of famine and in desperate need of supplies.

Israel must hold attackers to account and do more to allow aid in – I will be raising my concerns with the Israeli government.

On Monday, footage circulated on social media showing a group of men and women blocking aid trucks and pillaging and destroying their contents.

Boxes of food headed for Gaza, which is in the grip of a humanitarian emergency, were thrown on to the ground. Israeli police did not appear to intervene in the incident at the Tarqumiya checkpoint, west of Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

On Monday, a UN staff member was killed and another injured when their vehicle was struck in Rafah in southern Gaza, with the UN saying it had conveyed the clearly marked vehicle’s movements to Israeli authorities in advance.

Last week, Jordan said Israeli settlers attacked a humanitarian aid convoy on its way to Erez crossing in northern Gaza and “tampered with its contents”

My family is now sheltering in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. We had been living with two other families – 23 people – in an overcrowded house, writes Eman Mohamed, a maths teacher from Gaza.

But then more of our relatives from Rafah were displaced, and the number has now increased to 45. Imagine living in a house with so many people, each trying to make a small ration stretch beyond its limits in an attempt to get some calories for the day. Water, once taken for granted, is a precious commodity. We use seawater to bathe, and many get sick from drinking polluted water.

The living conditions here are abysmal for the tens of thousands of arrivals from Rafah seeking shelter and refuge. The crowding is unbearable. Outside on the streets are thousands of tents, filled with entire families. Some people sleep out in the open because there is nothing available to use as a tent, or even if they have a tent there is nowhere to put it because of the overcrowding.

Wastewater overflows into the streets and between the tents because there is nowhere else for it to go. The lack of sanitation causes disease, and the water is polluted. Mosquitoes and insects feed on the living, causing skin problems and reactions, and spreading more infections. We are fighting an invisible war against illness, infections and starvation.

You can read Mohamed’s full story here:

• Israeli tanks pushed deeper into eastern Rafah on Tuesday morning, entering the neighbourhoods of al-Jneina, al-Salam and al-Brazil, residents said. Officials estimate that as many as 500,000 people have fled Rafah since being told to evacuate by the Israel Defense Forces before their first attacks around and in the city a week ago.

• Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said Israel’s operations in Rafah have set back efforts at trying to reach a ceasefire in talks that are being mediated by Qatar and Egypt, although negotiations would continue. “Especially in the past few weeks, we have seen some momentum building but unfortunately things didn’t move in the right direction and right now we are on a status of almost a stalemate,” he told the Qatar Economic Forum. “Of course, what happened with Rafah has set us backward.”

• The UN’s international court of justice (ICJ) will hold hearings on Thursday and Friday to discuss new emergency measures sought by South Africa over Israel’s attacks on Rafah during the war in Gaza, the tribunal said.

• Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, meanwhile, said that Turkey has decided to submit its declaration of official intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. “We condemned civilians being killed on 7 October,” he told a press conference. “But Israel systematically killing thousands of innocent Palestinians and rendering a whole residential area uninhabitable is a crime against humanity, attempted genocide, and the manifestation of genocide.”

• One of ActionAid’s partners in Rafah, Wefaq, has paused humanitarian operations there, with the charity warning that aid operations could grind to a “complete halt” as aid workers face an “unprecedented” level of danger making their jobs become “impossible”. The charity says that aid workers in Rafah are “experiencing the same inhumane living conditions as the rest of the population” and that “virtually no aid” has entered Gaza in recent days.

• The Biden administration has assessed that Israel has amassed enough troops on the edge of Rafah to move forward with a full-scale incursion on the southern Gazan city over the coming days, CNN reported. The two senior administration officials also told the outlet that US officials are unsure if Israel has made a final decision to carry out the full-scale invasion.

The UN’s international court of justice will hold hearings on Thursday and Friday to discuss new emergency measures sought by South Africa over Israel’s attacks on Rafah during the war in Gaza, the tribunal said. This is a Reuters snap. We will give you more information as we get it.

Israel’s international allies and aid groups have repeatedly urged against a ground incursion into Rafah, the southern city packed with Palestinians who say they have nowhere else to go.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would be defying warnings of a potential humanitarian catastrophe by pushing ahead with a major offensive on the city.