Aid groups said there would be a high Palestinian death toll if Israeli forces stormed Rafah, and warned of the growing humanitarian crisis in the city
A Palestinian woman reacts at the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on Feb. 9.Israeli forces geared up on Friday for a ground assault on Hamas in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people displaced by violence further north are trapped in desperate conditions.
“Therefore, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the IDF and the security establishment to submit to the Cabinet a combined plan for evacuating the population and destroying the battalions.” An Israeli official who declined to be named said that Israel would try to organize for people in Rafah, most of whom fled there from the north, to be moved back northwards within Gaza ahead of any military operation there.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 27,947 Palestinians had been confirmed killed in the conflict, 107 of them in the previous 24 hours, and 67,459 injured. “We were sleeping inside and, when the strike hit, were thrown outside. After that, another rocket hit,” said Mohammed al-Nahal, an elderly Palestinian standing beside the rubble of a building that had been hit.