Manal al-Wakeel and her extended family of 30 thought they were going home.
Ms. Waqr, who was displaced from her home in Gaza City several months ago with relatives, began packing her belongings on Monday to dismantle her tent in Rafah, on the southern edge of the Gaza corridor.
Hamas announced it had accepted a ceasefire offer from Qatar and Egypt, leading many Gazans to believe a ceasefire was imminent. Their joy is short-lived. It quickly became clear that Hamas was not talking about the same proposal that Israel had approved days earlier, with Israel saying the two sides still had deep differences.
Instead, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets east of Rafah telling people to flee and move to Israel’s so-called northern humanitarian zone, while Israeli forces bombed the area. Health officials in Gaza say dozens of people have died since Israel invaded parts of Rafah this week.
“We thought a ceasefire was possible that day,” said Ms. Alwakr, 48, who helped prepare hot meals at the aid group World Central Kitchen.
She and her family have been sheltering near the Abu Yusuf al-Najjar hospital in an area hit by Israeli airstrikes and ground fighting. The hospital’s director, Dr. Marwan al-Hams, said on Monday that it had received the bodies of 26 people killed by Israeli fire and had treated 50 injured. The hospital was evacuated the next day.
So instead of returning home on Tuesday night, Ms. al-Wakeel, her husband, her 11 children and other relatives found a semi-truck that could transport them and their belongings, including handbags filled with clothes. boxes, pots, pans and tents worth $2,500 shekels – about $670 – to find another place to stay.
They left Rafah around midnight and headed north along with hundreds of tuk-tuks, trucks, cars and donkey carts packed with other displaced families and their belongings.
“It was a terrible night and the truck was moving slowly because it was so loaded,” she said.
After leaving Rafah, they often stopped at schools and other buildings, desperately searching for any open space where they could take shelter. But every place was packed with people.
Others were unable to find a place, and Ms. Wacker saw many people sleeping on the roadside next to the belongings they had fled with.
At a United Nations school in Deir al-Balah, a young man suggested they live in an empty concrete building with no doors or windows belonging to the Hamas-led government’s Ministry of Social Development.
“It looked like a dangerous place,” she said, adding that they were told that a woman and her daughter had previously been killed by an Israeli missile in a room in the building.
But they did not dare to wander any further in the darkness and decided to spend the night there and find a safer place the next morning.
“I am very sad and disappointed about what happened in Rafah because our situation there is stable,” she said. “We spent a lot of time trying to find new places for ourselves again, and we became frustrated and exhausted from repeating the same pain.”
Within a month of Saeda al-Nemnem, 42, giving birth to twins, Israel dropped leaflets on their shelter in Rafah ordering them to leave. Her family, also displaced from Gaza City, sent a relative to find a truck that could transport them north, despite heavy Israeli air strikes at the time.
The relative, Mohammed Jojo, was killed when Israel attacked the tractor he was riding in, she said.
She said he was “killed while taking us out of the area to a safer place”. “I feel like I caused his death.”
Although it is dangerous to hit the road, it is not safe to stay in Rafah.
She said she and her family of eight found shelter in a room attached to Al-Aqsa University’s main building where they could hear Israeli bombs, missiles and artillery blasts during the terrifying journey to the city of Khan Younis. Voice.
“My kids’ hearts were beating so fast, I could feel them,” she said. She said it was the most intense bombing she had ever heard, “so close and so scary for me and my children.”
