DUBAI: Forced displacement has pushed over a million people away from the Gazan city of Rafah, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said on Monday.
The small city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip had been sheltering around 1 million Palestinians who fled Israeli assaults on other parts of the enclave, aid groups said.
Since early May, Israel’s military has been carrying out what it says is a limited operation in Rafah to root out Hamas fighters and dismantle infrastructure used by the Palestinian Islamist militant group that runs Gaza.
The Israeli military has told civilians to go to an “expanded humanitarian zone” some 20 km (12 miles) away.
Many Palestinians have complained they are vulnerable to Israeli attacks wherever they go, and have been moving up and down the Gaza Strip in the past few months.
UNRWA said thousands of families now shelter in damaged and destroyed facilities in the city of Khan Younis, where the agency is providing essential services despite ‘increasing challenges’.
“Conditions are unspeakable,” the agency added.
MORE THAN HALF OF GAZA DESTORYED OR DAMAGED
Some 55 percent of all structures in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, damaged or possibly damaged since war erupted in the Palestinian territory eight months ago, according to preliminary satellite analysis by the UN.
The analysis showed more than 137,000 buildings affected, UNOSAT, the United Nations satellite analysis agency, said on X, formerly Twitter.
The estimate is based on a satellite image taken on May 3, and compared with images taken in May a year earlier, last September, and on October 15 -- just over a week after Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war.
The fresh satellite image was also compared to images taken during several dates in November, then again during the first months of this year, UNOSAT said.
“According to satellite imagery analysis, UNOSAT identified 36,591 destroyed structures,” the agency said in a statement.
In addition, it said it had seen "16,513 severely damaged structures, 47,368 moderately damaged structures, and 36,825 possibly damaged structures for a total of 137,297 structures".
“These correspond to around 55 percent of the total structures in the Gaza Strip and a total of 135,142 estimated damaged housing units,” it said.
