“Children cling to me, while dogs rummage in graves”; The terrible testimonies of Rafah

“Children cling to me, while dogs rummage in graves”; The terrible testimonies of Rafah

Scared is the word Rehab Abu Daqqa uses to describe the feeling as her seven children huddle around her as dogs growl outside their tent. The woman says the children saw dogs eating corpses. As he talks to the BBC team, there is a human leg by the fence. The children who once had a home, went to school, lived with the normality of the family and the community, are now refugees in a place that smells of death, reports Digi24.

“This morning, the dogs took a body out of one of the graves and ate it,” says Rehab Abu Daqqa. “From night to dawn, the dogs don’t let us sleep… the children cling to me because they are very scared.” Dogs come in packs. Those who had owners ended up on the streets after people died or were evicted. Next to them, some maidans are looking for everything they can eat. The cemetery has many shallow graves where people temporarily place their dead until they can take them to the areas where they lived.

Relatives put bricks on some graves to try to keep dogs away from the dead. “I do not accept that I or my children live next to a cemetery. My child is in 3rd grade and today instead of playing a game he drew a grave and in the middle he drew a dead body. These are the children of Palestine… What can I tell you? Terrible,” says the woman.

The cemetery is one of the places in Gaza that has become a refuge for people whose homes were destroyed during the war. There are more than 1.4 million people crammed into Rafah – five times its pre-war population. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, there are 22,000 people for every square kilometer.

Diseases are already spreading, there are outbreaks of diarrhea, hepatitis A and meningitis. On the other hand, people face starvation. Rafah is the last point that refugees from Gaza can reach. Currently, the border with Egypt is closed to the vast majority of displaced people. Abu Daqqa has already fled three times and may soon be forced to move again with her family if the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) offensive on Rafah continues.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a military operation in Rafah would continue “with or without” a ceasefire to destroy Hamas groups in the city. “Where to move [refugiații]?” asked Rik Peeperkorn, regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO), who recently returned from Rafah. “We already have a health crisis. We have a water and sanitation crisis, a food crisis. It is a humanitarian disaster. So there will be another humanitarian disaster on top of that. There will be many more deaths and many more diseases,” he said.

WHO is already preparing additional field hospitals to help people who will be forced to move. The problem, however, is what happens to the seriously ill and the elderly: “Our health system is already paralyzed and an incursion will actually mean that we will lose three more hospitals… they could be damaged, they could be partially destroyed. We are preparing for this with a contingency plan.”

At the European Hospital in Rafah, families are camped in whatever space they can find. Their children wander along the dark corridors, past the wounded on carts. In Gaza, no one speaks of hope anymore.