Gazans fearing Israeli assault on Rafah look to Cairo truce talks for hope

[February 13, 2024]  By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Dan Williams

CAIRO/JERUSALEM (Reuters) -U.S., Egyptian, Israeli and Qatari officials were expected to meet in Cairo on Tuesday to seek a truce in Gaza as more than a million civilians crammed into a southern corner of the Palestinian enclave, waiting in fear for an Israeli assault.

Amid growing international concern over the plight of civilians, Israeli tanks shelled the eastern sector of Rafah city overnight, residents said, although the anticipated ground offensive did not appear to have started.

The Israeli military said its forces killed dozens of Palestinian fighters in clashes in the southern and central Gaza Strip over the last 24 hours, including 30 in Khan Younis, a city close to Rafah on the coastal enclave's border with Egypt.

Gaza health officials said an Israeli strike on a house in Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed 16 Palestinians overnight.

In Khan Younis, Israeli tanks advanced further from the west and the east as bombing continued, residents said.

Israeli forces ordered displaced people in some shelters to head to Rafah. But the boom of tank shelling east of Rafah caused waves of panic inside the makeshift tent camps housing the displaced.

In Cairo, senior officials from the U.S., Egypt, Israel and Qatar were scheduled to meet to work on a three-phase framework that would see the release of hostages and achieve an extended pause, sources familiar with the matter said. No further details were immediately available.

With the Israel-Hamas war now in its fifth month, attention is focused on the situation in Rafah. Around half of Gaza's 2.3 million people are now living there in desperate conditions, including many who fled other areas under fire.

Israel says it intends to wipe out Hamas fighters operating in Rafah and evacuate civilians. Aid officials and foreign governments say there is nowhere for them to go, and Egypt has made clear it will not allow a refugee exodus over its border.

Much of the densely populated enclave is in ruins, with 28,473 Palestinians killed and 68,146 wounded since Oct. 7, according to Gaza health officials who announced 133 new Palestinian deaths in the past 24 hours.

Many other people are believed to be buried under rubble. Supplies of food, water and other essentials are running out and diseases are spreading.

"Since Israel said they are invading Rafah soon...we read our last prayers every night. Every night we say farewell to one another and to relatives outside Rafah," said 30-year-old Aya, who is living in a tent with her mother, grandmother and five siblings.

"Unless the world show some mercy and stop Israel from raiding Rafah, we think we are not going to survive. The sounds of shelling and explosions get closer and closer," she told Reuters via a chat app.

U.S. PRESSURE FOR A CEASEFIRE

In Geneva, Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the U.N.'s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, said it had not been informed of any Israeli evacuation plan and was not part of it.

A Palestinian man looks at the site of an Israeli strike on a mosque, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, February 12, 2024. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

"Where are you going to evacuate people to as no place is safe across the Gaza Strip, the north is shattered, riddled with unexploded weapons, it's pretty much unlivable," she said.

"Enough is enough. Any further escalation would be absolutely apocalyptic."

UNRWA, which fired some staff after Israel alleged that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza took part in the Oct. 7 assault, is a lifeline for Palestinian refugees in the Middle east.

In Berlin, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who will visit Israel on Wednesday, voiced concern about the looming Israeli offensive. She said Israel had the right to defend itself against terrorism, but this did not mean the expulsion of the population.

Israel says it takes steps to avoid harming civilians and accuses Hamas fighters of hiding among them, even in shelters - something the Palestinian militant group denies.

U.S. PRESSURE FOR A CEASEFIRE

On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden kept up pressure for a ceasefire, saying Washington was working on a hostage that would "bring an immediate and sustained period of calm into Gaza for at least six weeks."

The hostages were seized in the Oct. 7 raid on southern Israel by Hamas militants which killed 1,200 people and triggered Israel's military offensive. Securing their return is a priority for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government as it aims also to eradicate Hamas, which rules Gaza.

Biden has shown increasing exasperation with Netanyahu for not heeding his appeals to do more to minimize casualties and protect civilians in Gaza. He has urged Israel not to undertake a ground offensive in Rafah without a plan to protect the Palestinian civilians who are massed there.

The U.S. is Israel's closest ally and biggest foreign arms provider, giving $3.8 billion in military aid annually, and there was no indication that Washington would hold up such aid. The U.S. State Department said cutting aid would not be "more impactful than the steps Washington has already taken".

Netanyahu last week ordered Israel's military to create a plan to evacuate civilians during any ground offensive. Asked about those plans, an Israeli military spokesperson on Monday said he still did not know how it would be done.

The United Nations on Monday intensified calls for a ceasefire and opposed the idea of moving civilians in Rafah, saying nowhere "is currently safe in Gaza."

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Doha, Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Dan Williams in Jerusalem, and Reuters bureaux; Writing by Angus MacSwan, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

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