Israel-Hamas cease-fire hope fades, Palestinians told to evacuate east Rafah ahead of expected offensive

Israel's military ordered Palestinians in the eastern part of the Gaza Strip city of Rafah to evacuate on Monday ahead of a long-promised ground offensive by the Jewish state's leaders. The message was delivered with leaflets, phone calls, messages and media broadcasts in Arabic after a weekend in which a new ceasefire was expected in seven months. Israel-Hamas war he burst out again.

People quickly began fleeing the eastern part of Rafah on Monday, on foot or by any other means at their disposal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government had stressed its intention to carry out an incursion into Rafah, Gaza's southernmost city, over the past week despite recent efforts led by the US, Qatar and Egypt to negotiate a new deal cease fire

Those diplomatic efforts appeared to have failed on Sunday, however, with Israel and Hamas blaming each other for the impasse and Hamas then performing a deadly attack with rockets at an Israeli military checkpoint near a key border crossing between Israel and Gaza.

President Biden has pushed Israel for weeks to limit the scope of any Rafah operation and not to launch a ground offensive in the city without guaranteeing the safety of more than 1 million displaced Palestinian civilians believed to have taken refuge there from all over the Gaza Strip.

The Israel Defense Forces said on Monday they expected to evacuate up to 100,000 people from the eastern part of Rafah. The messages told them to head several kilometers northwest to the al-Mawasi area on Gaza's Mediterranean coast, where humanitarian aid has been prepared. The army said those preparations included basic necessities such as food, water and medicine, as well as a field hospital.

While there it had been hope last week that the latest flurry of international diplomacy could lead to a new deal to secure the release of dozens more Israeli hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a halt to fighting, averting a Rafah offensive, the IDF appears to they were preparing for this operation. of the Hamas attack at the Kerem Shalom border crossing.

Hamas militants launched the rocket attack from the eastern part of Rafah on Sunday, hitting the IDF checkpoint only about 1,000 feet away, next to the crossing point. The attack killed four IDF soldiers and wounded at least several others, the military said on Monday, raising by one the death toll given the previous day.

The IDF did not confirm that the evacuation order issued on Monday was directly related to the Hamas attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhuri was quoted by the Reuters news agency on Monday as saying the evacuation order constituted “a dangerous escalation” by Israel, which it warned would “have consequences”.

Zuhuri blamed the United States for continuing to support Israel in the war, which was sparked by Hamas's unprecedented October 7 terror attack on Israel, which saw the militants kill around 1,200 people and take about 240 more hostages. About 100 of those captives, including five US nationals, are believed to be still alive, held by Hamas or its allies in Gaza.

Axios news outlet, citing an unnamed Hamas official, said on Monday that the group, long designated a terrorist organization by Israel and the US, was threatening to walk away from negotiations for another release of hostages and a ceasefire for the evacuation order.

For the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have sought refuge in Rafah, many of them displaced several times already by Israel's war with Hamas rulers in Gaza, Monday morning brought more fear and uncertainty.

“They are calling people in the eastern area of ​​Rafah, some also in the west, near the Rafah crossing, ordering them to leave,” said Palestinian Abu Muhey, who has taken refuge with members of his family north of Rafah. “We don't know what to do, but I will take my family to Deir Al-Balah,” he said, suggesting they would try to flee further north into decimated Palestinian territory.

Given the scale of destruction in Gaza, US officials have expressed concern for weeks about the feasibility of moving so many people out of harm's way before any Rafah offensive. Meanwhile, the United Nations has issued a series of increasingly dire warnings that a full-scale military operation in the city would leave hundreds of thousands of civilians at risk of death.

“An Israeli offensive in #Rafah would mean more civilian suffering and death. The consequences would be devastating for 1.4 million people,” the UN humanitarian agency for the Palestinians, UNRWA, reiterated in a post on Monday Social Networks.

“UNRWA is not evacuating,” the UN agency bluntly stated in its tweet. “The Agency will maintain a presence in Rafah for as long as possible and continue to provide life-saving assistance to people.”