Geneva - More than 100,000 people have fled Rafah, the United Nations said Friday, with the southern Gaza city under threat of a full-scale Israeli ground invasion. |
"More than 100,000 people have fled Rafah," said Hamish Young, UNICEF's senior emergency coordinator in the Gaza Strip, told a briefing in Geneva via video link from Rafah.
Israel's military on Monday called for Gazans to leave eastern Rafah, which triggered widespread international alarm.
|The UN children's agency UNICEF said more than 100,000 had left, with the UN humanitarian agency OCHA putting the figure at more than 110,000.
All eyes have been on Rafah in recent weeks, where the population had swelled to around 1.5 million after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled fighting in other areas of Gaza.
Georgios Petropoulos, head of OCHA's sub-office in Gaza, said the situation in the besieged Palestinian territory had reached "even more unprecedented levels of emergency".
"Shelters already lined Al-Mawasi's dunes and it's now becoming difficult to move between the mass of tents and tarpaulins.
AFP journalists in the Gaza Strip early Friday witnessed artillery strikes on Rafah on the territory's southern border with Egypt.
Israel bombarded Gaza including Rafah on Friday after negotiators left truce talks in Cairo without a deal and a senior UN official said aid operations are now all but impossible.
AFP journalists witnessed artillery strikes on Rafah after US President Joe Biden vowed in an interview to cut off artillery shells and other weapons for Israel if a full-scale offensive into the southern Gaza city goes ahead.
It was the first time Biden raised the ultimate US leverage over Israel, military aid totaling $3 billion a year, after repeated appeals for Israel to stay out of Rafah.
Despite widespread international opposition, Israeli troops on Tuesday entered Rafah's eastern sector.
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