No water, no food. The Mayor of Rafah tells the details of a humanitarian disaster in the city

Mayor of Rafah Ahmed Al-Sufi: More than 300,<> displaced people from the northern Gaza Strip have sought refuge in the city of Rafah (Al-Jazeera)

Gaza – More than 600,300 people are hit by several crises in the southernmost city of Rafah on the border with Egypt, including <>,<> displaced people who sought refuge in the city from the north of the Strip, after all public schools and those of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) were overwhelmed with displaced people, in addition to the homes of relatives and friends, and the headquarters of sports and social clubs.

Rafah is one of the cities identified by the occupation army in its repeated warnings to the residents of Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, to go to the south, and it is a city that is not qualified in terms of service facilities and infrastructure, to receive hundreds of thousands of displaced people who live in a deteriorating humanitarian reality.

The mayor of Rafah, Dr. Ahmed Al-Sufi, said – in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Net – that "the bloody and destructive Israeli war, exacerbated the tragic reality of the city, which suffers mainly from many crises, resulting from the long years of siege."

The following interview with al-Sufi deals with topics related to the emergency reality imposed on the city, as a result of the war and forced displacement, and in conjunction with the siege imposed by the occupation state since the outbreak of war on the seventh of last October.

• How many displaced people are there from northern Gaza to Rafah city, and how have you dealt with this emergency influx?

According to the latest census of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2022, the population of the city of Rafah is about 300,300 people, and due to the large displacement movement from Gaza City and the cities of the northern Gaza Strip, to escape the killing and destruction after the threats of the occupation to the residents of those cities, more than 44,27 displaced people sought refuge in the city of Rafah, residing in <> UNRWA schools, <> government schools, sports club headquarters, public and private facilities and facilities, as well as thousands who sought refuge in the homes of relatives and friends.

This massive displacement of thousands, including large numbers of women and children, has put pressure on unqualified service facilities and infrastructure, which have already suffered from a lack of development and rehabilitation for many years, as a result of the suffocating siege imposed by the occupying power on the Gaza Strip since mid-2007.

• What are the repercussions of this deteriorating reality on the lives of the city's residents and displaced people?

To know these repercussions, we must diagnose the reality before the outbreak of the war, as the city suffers from the lack of sufficient mechanisms for the municipality's work in various aspects of life, the weakness of the qualified infrastructure for water and sanitation, and the lack of electronic bakeries with large production capacity, as the occupation authorities prevent the supply of modern machines for such bakeries, and we lack the ability to store goods and foodstuffs in quantity and quality, the most important of which is flour.

In addition, the city of Rafah, like the rest of the cities in the Gaza Strip, suffers from the chronic electricity crisis, as the city needs 30 megawatts, of which only 11 megawatts are available, with a deficit of about 60%.

With this difficult and deteriorating reality, before the outbreak of the war, the municipality was only able to provide 40% of the civilian services to the population, but now, due to the repercussions of the war, the percentage has decreased to only 20%.

All the services we rely on have been stopped mainly due to power outages, and fuel-powered generators have been used, which cannot operate continuously around the clock.

Due to the intransigence of the occupation and its refusal to bring in fuel, many vital services such as water wells, sewage pumps, garbage collection and removal vehicles, and bakeries have been suspended.

Over the past two days, as a result of heavy rains that put pressure on the sewage network, and as the pumps stopped working, untreated sewage leaked into the streets, threatening residents with health hazards and an environmental disaster due to its flow into the sea.

Water per capita in Rafah city drops from 80 liters to zero (European)

• Rafah residents suffer from severe shortages of drinking water, are residents facing a thirst crisis?

According to the World Health Organization, the per capita share is 100 liters of water for drinking and other uses, and in the normal situation before the outbreak of the war we did not reach this rate, and the per capita share in the city of Rafah was 80 liters, and it has now decreased to zero, with the cessation of underground wells, where the fuel necessary to pump water to homes is not available, which would cause environmental disasters and the spread of diseases and epidemics, due to the lack of water necessary for hygiene and domestic use.

The quality of this water is poor, undrinkable and contains a high salinity content far exceeding global averages.

Therefore, the population relies on private and public desalination plants to supply drinking water, which was affected by the war, as the desalination plant in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, which supplied the city of Rafah with one million liters per day, stopped, as well as the majority of commercial desalination plants due to the depletion of fuel.

• Has not the city, within which the Rafah crossing with Egypt is located, benefited from the humanitarian aid flowing through it?

First and foremost, all the aid trucks that entered the Gaza Strip through the Rafah land crossing in a few weeks did not exceed the number of trucks that entered the Strip in the two days before the outbreak of the war, through the only commercial Kerem Shalom crossing, estimated at about 600 trucks per day carrying various humanitarian needs for more than two million Palestinians.

As well as fuel of all kinds, which the occupation prevents from supplying as part of the aid through the Rafah crossing, which is limited to bottles of drinking water, canned food, and simple medical aid, all of which do not meet or take into account the needs of the Gaza Strip, which have multiplied significantly as a result of the ongoing war for the second month in a row.

This assistance is not enough to meet the needs of the displaced in the shelters, does not prevent the disaster, and has had little impact on the lives of the population, who are living a tragic reality as a result of the fierce war and the siege and the application.

Markets and shops have now run out of most of the goods and foodstuffs, and even the markets lack many agricultural crops, because farmers cannot access their land, which is mainly concentrated in Rafah and the rest of the Gaza Strip cities along the security fence surrounding the Gaza Strip from the eastern side, which are dangerous areas.

There are farmers who lost their lives in airstrikes and artillery shelling while trying to reach their land and the poultry and livestock farms scattered in those areas.

• Can you prioritize what the city of Rafah needs?

Not only Rafah, but all the cities of the Gaza Strip urgently need heavy vehicles, including cranes, ambulances and civil defense, to cope with the large number of casualties and destruction as a result of Israeli air strikes.

To bring the picture closer, one crane used to remove the rubble of destroyed houses is shared by Rafah with the city of Khan Yunis, and in all cities of the Gaza Strip there are only 5 cranes, and the war has broken out, and there are only one old and dilapidated rams in the city of Rafah, and these machines are basically not intended for work in times of war and to recover victims.

We need machines dedicated to rescue and work in times of crisis and war, including those small vehicles that can search for neighborhoods under the rubble of destroyed houses and buildings, under which thousands of martyrs remain, and a number of them who stayed for hours alive under the rubble could have been rescued if they had been reached in time, but the civil defense teams were unable to retrieve them, due to the weakness of capabilities and the lack of human cadres.

In Rafah, for example, the number of civil defense crews does not exceed 120 personnel, with a severe shortage of ambulances and rescue vehicles and equipment to deal with rubble and fires.

Among our current needs in the city is the rapid completion and opening of the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Hospital, which is built on 50 dunums (one thousand square meters), funded by the State of Qatar, and the first phase of the emergency and surgery departments has been completed, and is supposed to open in 2025.

Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics in Gaza City (Al Jazeera)

• Do you have a preliminary estimate of the losses and the extent of the destruction suffered by Rafah?

It is known to all that the movement is fraught with many dangers, and it is not possible to reach all parts of the city to limit the damage caused by Israeli air raids, land and sea bombardment, but so far we have been able to monitor the total destruction of 320 multi-storey houses and 800 housing units, while about 10,4 houses were damaged, in addition to the total destruction of the municipality's <>-storey Doha building, which includes the city's post office and other facilities.

In addition, the losses are heavy in the agricultural sector as a result of the direct targeting of large areas of land in the eastern areas adjacent to the security fence in the city of Rafah, and throughout the Gaza Strip, as well as due to the destruction of agricultural crops and the death of poultry and livestock due to the inability of farmers to reach these high-risk areas.

Source : Al Jazeera