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7 months ago
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TOP NEWS
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When Mohammed al-Lahham and his family returned last week to Khan Younis, their hometown in Gaza, they went back to a city and home scarred by Israeli bombardment. They hoped they would not be forced to flee again.
“The situation here in my city is unbearable, but at least it is better than living in a tent,” said Mr. al-Lahham, a 41-year-old plumber and father of five. “I am finally back in Khan Younis, my hometown, where I know its people and places and streets.”
Those streets, many of them bulldozed, are now rimmed with the rubble of entire buildings after a ground invasion by Israeli forces left the city nearly unrecognizable. The forces withdrew from Khan Younis last month.
Much of Mr. al-Lahham’s home in the center of the city was destroyed, but the family has been trying to re-establish its life in the one room that remained mostly intact.
“I live in a room in which walls were blown off,” he said. “I put up some blankets I got from the U.N. as curtains to protect us inside.”
More than 630,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes and shelters in and around the southern city of Rafah since Israel began a military offensive on May 6, UNRWA, the primary U.N. agency for Palestinians said on Friday. Before May 6, Rafah, on the border with Egypt, had become home to more than one million Palestinians who fled their homes elsewhere in Gaza seeking a modicum of safety, even as the Israeli military continued to carry out airstrikes on the city. It was one of the last places that had not been invaded by Israeli soldiers.
Now, many Palestinians are seeking shelter in places like the central city of Deir al Balah and Al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of Khan Younis. Both are overcrowded and facing dire conditions, U.N. and aid groups have said.
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Israel continues to characterize its offensive in and around Rafah as a “limited operation” against Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The seizure of the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, intensified airstrikes and artillery, and an expanding ground invasion into parts of Rafah have forced about half the Palestinians living and seeking shelter there to flee.
Satellite imagery suggested that a significant incursion was already underway.
On Thursday, Israel said it would send more forces to Rafah, signaling that it intended to attack deeper into Rafah despite international concerns about the threat to civilians posed by a full-scale invasion of the city.
In the north, Israeli attacks and new military evacuation orders displaced more than 160,000 people from several areas around Gaza City, according to UNRWA.
“Forced displacement continues in the #GazaStrip,” UNRWA posted on social media this week, adding that “about 20% of #Gaza’s population have been displaced again in the past week Families keep fleeing where they can — including to rubble & sand dunes — in search of safety. But there’s no such thing in Gaza.”
Beyond the displacement, the Israeli offensive and fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas have prevented nearly all aid from entering Gaza through the two main border crossings, and has impeded the little aid that has reached Gaza from being distributed, according to the U.N. and other aid groups.
That has forced families like the al-Lahhams to fend almost entirely for themselves.
On Thursday, Mr. al-Lahham stood in line with two of his sons to fill cans with water from a large tank brought in by a charity.
Even though Mr. al-Lahham said he was shot in his right shoulder by an Israeli armed drone, a wound that has yet to heal because the bullet is still inside, he knew he needed to get drinking water for his family.
“I sometimes try to carry heavy things with my left arm, like gallons of water,” he said. “You can see how I move it painfully, and this will affect my work as a plumber.”
While the water on Thursday was free, nothing else in the battered city was.
Even charging his cellphone at a street vendor cost him a few shekels. And with nearly no aid and limited commercial goods coming into Gaza, prices in the markets have increased more.
Mr. al-Lahham and his family are terrified they might be forced to flee again if the Israeli Army re-invades their city. If it does, they plan to go to al-Mawasi. He just didn’t know how they would get there.
He had to borrow nearly $100 to pay for a van to bring his family to Khan Younis from Rafah.
“I don’t know where I could get any money to take us and our belongings if anything bad happened,” he said. “Why is all of this suffering still going on?”
Key Developments
Israeli forces recovered the bodies of three Israeli hostages who were taken captive as they fled a music festival during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, the Israeli military said on Friday. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, identified the bodies as those of Amit Buskila, Shani Louk and Yitzhak Gelernter. He said Israeli troops had recovered the bodies during an operation in Gaza on Thursday night but did not say where they were found.
Lawyers representing Israel defended the military operation in Rafah as “limited and localized,” arguing at the United Nations’ top court on Friday that the judges should not seek to restrict Israel’s actions in Gaza. Israel was responding to a South African petition for the International Court of Justice in The Hague to order an immediate halt to its ground assault in Rafah.
The top diplomats of 13 countries — including every member of the Group of 7 industrialized democracies except the United States — said in a joint letter that Israel must take “urgent action” to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The letter addressed to Israel’s foreign minister, a copy of which was seen by The New York Times, calls on the Israeli authorities to expand the amount of aid entering the territory, take “concrete action” to protect civilians and work toward a “sustainable cease-fire.”
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A group of American medical volunteers who had become trapped in the Gaza Strip were evacuated from the enclave on Friday, according to the State Department and humanitarian medical groups. It had been nearly a week since Israel began its offensive in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, preventing the medical workers from leaving.
A physician, Dr. Ammar Ghanem, who had been volunteering for more than two weeks, described the uncertainty as he made his way out of Gaza after days of not knowing what would happen. He had arrived as part of an international group of 18 doctors, nurses and pharmacists at the beginning of May. They had intended to leave together on Monday, but the escalating violence in Gaza and the border closing made that impossible.
By Friday afternoon, 17 American medical workers were met at the Kerem Shalom border crossing by a team from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, according to an American official familiar with the events. Among them were Dr. Ghanem and four of his colleagues who were volunteering with the Palestinian American Medical Association at the European General Hospital in Khan Younis. The others were there with F.A.J.R. Scientific, a U.S.-based nonprofit.
Three American doctors with the Palestinian American Medical Association stayed behind to keep working, according to Dr. Mustafa Musleh, president of the group. Other volunteers with the organization remained because only those with American citizenship had been granted permission to leave.
“We are happy for the volunteers who made it back,” Dr. Musleh said, but he expressed frustration with the process and with the fact that new volunteers had not been allowed in, adding that a team of 11 doctors was waiting in Cairo for permission to enter. “The emergency is not only to get the volunteers out, but to help the people who are suffering.”
Last week, Israeli forces launched an attack on Rafah, where more than a million displaced people had been sheltering.They closed the Rafah crossing with Egypt, a vital entry point for humanitarian aid.
Additionally, Israel shut down the Kerem Shalom crossing but reopened it on Wednesday.
The Rafah attack has also prevented dozens of wounded and ill Palestinians from reaching Egypt to receive medical treatment, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
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On Friday morning at the European General Hospital, the group of volunteers met in front of the emergency room for an emotional goodbye before the Americans left for Kerem Shalom, Dr. Ghanem said.
He had arrived with the team in Gaza on May 1, expecting to stay until May 13. Another team was scheduled to replace them two days later.
But about a week into his time in Gaza, as Israel ordered evacuations in parts of Rafah, he began to worry. Their group leaders convened the team to discuss the possibility of evacuation and began drawing up a list of which doctors should leave first based on family or work obligations.
Meanwhile, it sounded like the explosions were getting closer, Dr. Ghanem said. The borders remained closed, and two days after they were supposed to leave, there had been no new confirmation that anyone could leave, he said.
On Thursday, the group leaders told the team that they had heard from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem that only Americans would be allowed to evacuate.
Deciding to leave was difficult, Dr. Ghanem said, complicated by the fact that colleagues from countries including Saudi Arabia, Australia and Jordan were not allowed to.
“We felt that we had to evacuate because we need to go back home,” he said. “We need to take care of our broken families and support them.”
The journey from the European General Hospital, near Khan Younis, to the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel was coordinated by COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories and works with international organizations, and the American Embassy, said Dr. Musleh, of the Palestinian American Medical Association.
The 12-mile trip took almost five hours, Dr. Ghanem said, because the roads that they had been told to take for safety reasons had been damaged by bombardment. They also had car trouble.
After crossing into Israel, the U.S. Embassy team that met them drove them to Jerusalem. After a few hours’ sleep, Dr. Ghanem started the even longer journey back to Michigan, where he lives with his wife and three children.
Edward Wong contributed reporting.
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As trucks loaded with humanitarian aid began rolling onto the shores of Gaza through a temporary pier this week, U.S. officials and aid groups emphasized that the new sea corridor could not replace the most efficient way of getting supplies to the territory’s civilians: land border crossings.
The United Nations gave an indication on Friday of how much the flow of aid through those crossings has dried up. Just 310 aid trucks entered Gaza in the 10 days after Israel began its military incursion in the southern city of Rafah, U.N. officials said.
That is far shy of what aid organizations say is needed in the territory. Humanitarian workers have repeatedly warned that famine is looming amid severe shortages of basic goods among civilians, many of whom have been displaced multiple times.
Before May 6, most aid reaching Gaza was delivered through two southern border crossings, at Rafah and Kerem Shalom.
As Israel entered Rafah, it seized and closed the border crossing with Egypt there, in what its military said was a limited operation against Hamas. Israel temporarily shut the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel after a Hamas rocket attack in the area killed four Israeli soldiers. The flow of goods has remained severely limited even after it was reopened.
From May 6 to Wednesday, 33 trucks entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman, said on Friday. In the same period, 277 trucks entered through two crossings in northern Gaza, he said. The trucks were carrying flour and other food aid, according to the United Nations.
U.S. and Israeli officials have previously said one of the reasons for the stoppage is that Egypt is trying to pressure Israel to pull back from Rafah by not allowing trucks at that crossing to redirect to Kerem Shalom.
More than 2,000 trucks of aid were stuck on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing as of Thursday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees aid delivery in Gaza, said on Friday that 365 trucks of aid had entered Gaza in the past day. It did not specify whether the figure included deliveries from the temporary pier. Israel and the United Nations use different methods to track truck deliveries.
