Rafah residents ordered to evacuate: 'Nowhere safe for anybody to go in Gaza'
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00:00 For more, I'm joined by John Linden, the executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace.
00:04 Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Do you know how these evacuations
00:09 are going so far? Are there safe places for people to go to?
00:12 Well, no, there's nowhere safe for anybody to go in Gaza, and particularly in the southern
00:18 part of the Gaza Strip, where we already have intense overcrowding in some of the makeshift
00:22 zones that have been designated for humanitarian exit from the Rafa area. I have been hearing about
00:30 quite a large movement this morning, including from western Rafa, so the furthest away part of
00:35 the Rafa metropolitan area from the IDF. And it's not clear, number one, where these people will go
00:41 to, but number two, how there can be a de-conflicting process that can ensure that once
00:46 very intense violence begins, which does seem increasingly likely, that those people fleeing
00:50 aren't caught in the crosshairs. And do we know how many people are still in these targeted areas?
00:55 Because the UN and the Israeli army are giving different figures for how many people have left.
00:59 Well, we've heard that it's between one and 1.4 million people in recent days were estimated to
01:06 be in the Rafa area. I've heard this morning that 300,000 people potentially have evacuated. That's
01:11 from an Israeli official source. So you could say that at the lower end of the estimate, around
01:17 700,000 people, and the higher end, still 1 to 1.1 million people are in the wider Rafa area.
01:24 At the higher estimate, that's half the population of the Gaza Strip. So that's still a huge number
01:29 of people. And there's also the question of aid. The Rafa border crossing has been closed since it
01:33 was taken over by Israel earlier this week. They've opened the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing,
01:38 but almost no aid is getting in there. Do you know how civilians are doing in terms of food
01:42 and fuel supplies? Well, we know from reports from the United Nations that hospitals were due
01:48 to run out of fuel for generators within the next day or two, essentially. And that's before
01:53 this second closure was announced. I mean, you know, the Egyptian government also have a role
01:58 to play here with regards to Rafa. They seem unhappy with regards to the Rafa crossing. I mean,
02:03 they seem unhappy with Israel's sort of decision to now have an active operation in the Rafa area.
02:08 They're not allowing the transit of goods from Rafa, now controlled by Israel, to the Kerem
02:13 Shalom crossing. So we're in a situation now where, you know, UN authorities had already
02:17 been warning about famine. And obviously the southern part of the Gaza Strip had, in relative
02:21 terms, been less affected than the north. But it's highly likely that we're now going to see
02:26 a rapid deterioration of already very grim humanitarian conditions in the south, potentially
02:31 to match the catastrophe that we already have in the north of the Gaza Strip. And it's just,
02:35 it's so hard to fathom when you have, you know, Egypt and Israel on either side of Gaza,
02:39 these crossings that can be opened, port facilities in Ashdod, why we can't do a better
02:45 job of getting food and medical equipment into the Gaza Strip, irregardless of what is happening
02:49 from a military perspective. And Joe Biden said this week that the US would suspend further
02:54 shipments of some weapons if Israel crosses a red line and launches a full offensive on Rafa.
02:59 Israel is clearly expanding his operation. Do we think this qualifies or do we have any sense of
03:04 where that red line is going to be? No, it's a very short answer. It's in the eye of the beholder.
03:11 You know, there wasn't very clear conditions or details laid down in any of the briefings over
03:16 what the threshold would be for the kind of operation the US would oppose in Rafa. It has
03:22 two contours, right? One is the severity of the operation, and the second is the preparations or
03:27 lack thereof to take care of the civilians who are sheltering in the Rafa area. And it's too
03:32 soon to say with regard to both of those conditions where Israel is going to land.
03:37 The evacuation orders sent out this morning indicate that there would be quite a large
03:43 operation if you're asking hundreds of thousands of people to flee. But then again, there's a
03:48 contradiction in terms. Perhaps Israel is announcing this evacuation in order to show to the world and
03:54 to the United States in particular that it is taking some preparations to look after the civilian
03:59 population in Rafa. And then actually what follows will be a less intense operation. And of course,
04:03 the hope of all hopes, and I don't know how confident I am in this anymore, is that all of
04:07 this is designed to simply generate the sort of pressure which could result in the gaps being
04:12 closed and a deal for a ceasefire and hostages being returned to be secured. And we have to
04:17 cross our fingers that that's actually how this is going to play out, because it's the only way I
04:21 can see now that we don't in the coming days witness a significant escalation in Rafa.
04:27 Yeah, that ceasefire deal is the hope of all hopes. I also wanted to ask you what you make
04:31 of the report from the Biden administration that Israel's use of American weapons may have
04:36 violated international law. Do you think that sends a strong message or is it somewhat of a
04:40 cop out since it does stop short of a definitive answer that would force the US to stop sending
04:45 weapons? Yeah, there's a couple of caveats in there, sort of conditionality around the way in
04:50 which the language is framed. So it's like a lot of what's happening at the moment. It's not going
04:56 to satisfy either parties. People who are strong advocates for Israel will see this as being sort
05:01 of a Rubicon that the Biden administration has crossed, whilst those who are most upset and
05:06 outraged by the military operations we've seen so far will assume that the Biden administration
05:11 have pulled their punches. So in trying to kind of maintain that centre ground, which I very much
05:15 respect as an impulse, ultimately, the longer this war goes on, the more that partisans for either
05:23 Israelis or Palestinians are going to feel upset by what they will see as insufficiently strong and
05:28 clear measures from the Biden administration, which is why the best way we can ensure that
05:31 there are no human rights abuses taking place and that no further lives are lost is to bring this
05:36 war to an end as rapidly as possible and get those hostages out. Everything else I feel is simply
05:42 rolling the dice every 24 hours on further horrors. All right, John Linden, thank you again
05:47 so much for speaking with us today. We're hoping that that hope of hopes comes true for some sort
05:51 of ceasefire soon. Again, that's John Linden, the Executive Director of the Alliance for Middle East