Photos: Palestinians flee the Tal as-Sultan area of ​​Rafah amid Israeli attack | Israel-Palestine conflict news

Hundreds of people braved roads in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Tuesday as they fled Israel’s growing ground attack, with increased shelling, tanks in the city center and forces positioned on higher ground.

“We are in panic and afraid,” Ihab Zorob, 40, from west Rafah, told AFP.

“Our children and wives didn’t stop crying. The shelling last night and throughout the morning was intense and severe,” he said.

“Seeing people fleeing made us more afraid, so we decided to seek shelter in al-Mawasi [on the coast]. We hope to find space there.”

Rafah, a city near the Palestinian territory’s southern border with Egypt, has been under Israeli ground attack since early May.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said around a million civilians have fled Rafah since the ground attack took place, despite a chorus of international warnings.

On Tuesday, AFP reporters saw people carrying whatever belongings they could as they fled Tal as-Sultan, west of Rafah, where an attack on Sunday that Israel said targeted Hamas killed 45 people, officials said. Palestinians.

The luckiest transported piles of mattresses and blankets and dozens of children in the back of trucks, while others carried what they could in garbage bags or walked with mattresses wrapped around their heads.

In the nearby southern town of Khan Younis, AFP reporters saw piles of pillows, mattresses and bags of clothes covering a sandy area where people fleeing Rafah had settled.

Yasser Adwan, a 22-year-old resident of west Rafah, told AFP that “Israeli drones were targeting anyone moving or walking on the streets of Rafah.”

He reported several victims “left on the street” because civil defense teams were unable to recover them for fear of being the target of attacks themselves.

Fatima al-Nams, 65, a resident of Rafah, told AFP that “throughout the night, the shelling did not stop, with aerial, artillery and vehicle fire advancing to the west” of the city.

“We will evacuate like other citizens now,” added Nams, who, as a resident of the last area of ​​the Gaza Strip to be attacked by ground troops, had not yet been displaced, unlike most people in the territory.