Mayor of Rafah to Al Jazeera Net: We are exposed to a humanitarian disaster and these are our needs Policy

Gaza- Several crises are affecting more than 600,000 people in the southern city of Rafah Gaza strip On the border with Egypt, including 300,000 displaced people who took refuge in the city from the northern Gaza Strip, after all government schools and those affiliated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees were overcrowded (UNRWA) of the displaced, in addition to the homes of relatives and friends, and the headquarters of sports and social clubs.

Rafah is considered one of the cities designated by the occupation army in its repeated warnings to the residents of Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, to go south to it. 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 situation.

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

The following dialogue with Al-Sufi addresses topics related to the emergency reality that was imposed on the city, as a result of the war and forced displacement, and in conjunction with a severe siege imposed by the occupying state since the outbreak of war on the seventh of last October.

• How many people are displaced from northern Gaza to the city of Rafah, and how did you deal with this emergency human influx?

According to the latest census of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2022, the population of the city of Rafah is approximately 300 thousand people, and as a result of the large displacement movement from Gaza City and the cities of the northern Gaza Strip, to escape killing and destruction after the occupation’s threats to the residents of those cities, more than 300 thousand took refuge in the city of Rafah. Displaced people, they reside in 44 UNRWA schools, 27 government schools, and in the headquarters of sports clubs, public and private facilities and facilities, and there are also thousands who have taken refuge in the homes of relatives and friends.

This large displacement of thousands, including large numbers of women and children, has put pressure on service facilities and infrastructure, which are not qualified, and which mainly suffer from a lack of development and rehabilitation for many years, as a result of the stifling siege imposed by the occupying state on the sector since mid-2007.

• What are the repercussions of this deteriorating reality on the lives of the city’s residents and those displaced there?

To know these repercussions, we must diagnose the reality before the outbreak of war, as the city suffers from the lack of sufficient mechanisms for the municipality’s work in various aspects of life, the weakness of qualified water and sanitation infrastructure, and the lack of electronic bakeries with large production capacity, as the occupation authorities prevent the supply of machines. 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 other cities in the Gaza Strip, suffers from a 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, the municipality before the outbreak of war was only able to provide 40% of civil services to the population, but now, due to the repercussions of the war, the percentage has decreased to only 20%.

Essentially all the services we depend on have stopped due to the power outage, and fuel-powered generators have been used and cannot operate continuously around the clock.

Due to the occupation’s intransigence and refusal to bring in fuel, many vital services stopped, such as water wells, sewage pumps, waste collection and transport vehicles, and bakeries.

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

• Rafah residents suffer from a severe shortage of drinking water. Are residents facing a thirst crisis?

According to Global Health OrganizationThe per capita share is 100 liters of water for drinking and other uses. In the normal situation before the outbreak of war, we did not reach this rate. The per capita share in the city of Rafah was 80 liters, and it has now decreased to zero, with the groundwater wells stopping, as the necessary fuel is not available. To pump water into homes, 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, unfit for drinking, and contains a high percentage of salinity that far exceeds global averages.

Therefore, residents depend on private and public water desalination plants to supply drinking water, which was affected by the war. The desalination plant in Deir al-Balah in the middle of the Strip, which used to supply the city of Rafah with one million liters per day, also stopped as the majority of commercial desalination plants stopped due to running out of fuel.

• Didn’t the city, within which the Rafah crossing with Egypt is located, benefit from the humanitarian aid flowing through it?

First of all, all aid trucks that entered the Gaza Strip through Rafah crossing Over the past few weeks, the number of trucks that entered the Gaza Strip in two days before the outbreak of war, through the only commercial crossing at Kerem Shalom, is estimated at approximately 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 being supplied 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 sector, which have greatly multiplied as a result of the ongoing war for the second month in a row.

This aid is not sufficient to meet the needs of the displaced in shelter centers, does not prevent the disaster from occurring, and has had little impact on the lives of the residents, who are living in a tragic reality as a result of the fierce war and the imposed siege.

Now the majority of goods and foodstuffs have run out of markets and shops, and even the markets lack many agricultural crops, due to the inability of farmers to reach their lands, which are mainly concentrated in the city of Rafah and the rest of the cities of the Gaza Strip along the security fence surrounding the Gaza Strip from the eastern side, which are dangerous areas.

There are farmers who lost their lives in air strikes and artillery shelling while trying to reach their lands and the poultry and livestock farms spread in those areas.

• Can you define the priorities that the city of Rafah needs?

Not only Rafah, but all the cities of the Gaza Strip, urgently and urgently need heavy machinery, including rams and cranes, ambulances and civil defense vehicles, to cope with the large volume of casualties and destruction resulting from Israeli air strikes.

To bring the picture closer, one crane is used to lift the rubble of destroyed homes, which Rafah shares with the city of Khan Yunis. In all the cities of the Strip, there are only 5 cranes. The war has broken out, and in the city of Rafah there are only rams (a mechanism resembling tongs) and one old one. It is dilapidated, and these machines are not intended to work during wartime and recover victims.

We need machines dedicated to rescue and work in times of crises and wars, including those small machines that can search for those alive under the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings, under which there are still thousands of martyrs, and it would have been possible to save numbers of them who spent hours alive under the rubble if they had been reached in time. However, the civil defense teams were unable to rescue them, due to weak capabilities and a lack of human resources.

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

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

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

It is known to everyone that movement is fraught with many dangers, and it is not possible to reach all parts of the city to determine the damage resulting from Israeli air strikes and land and sea bombardment. However, so far we have been able to monitor the complete destruction of 320 multi-storey houses and 800 housing units, while About 10,000 homes sustained varying degrees of damage, in addition to the complete destruction of the municipality’s Doha Building, which consists of 4 floors and houses the city’s post office and other facilities.

In addition, there are huge losses in the agricultural sector as a result of the direct targeting of vast 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 damage to agricultural crops and the death of poultry and livestock due to the inability of farmers to reach these highly dangerous areas.