Reducing Rafah’s Civilian Population

The Biden administration has been trying without success to persuade Israel not to enter Rafah in order to take apart the last four intact battalions of Hamas operatives. One of its arguments has been that there are 1.3 million people now in Rafah, with about 900,000 of them having fled the battlegrounds in northern and central Gaza, as was advised by the IDF, and that it would be impossible to persuade more than a handful of them to move yet again. But even without the IDF starting a campaign to warn people in Rafah to leave for areas further north, between Rafah and the Wadi Gaza, it seems that enough Gazans have already decided without any prompting to move to areas where, according to the IDF, they will be safe. This undercuts the Bidenites’ insistence that the vast majority of Gazan civilians will remain in Rafah, where many will become casualties of war, which is why, Biden and Blinken claim, Israel should stay out of Rafah. Yet in the first month of the war, Israel managed, through various means — dropping fourteen million leaflets, sending six million messages, making four million phone calls — to persuade 900,000 of them to leave northern Gaza and move, as advised by the IDF, south of the Wadi Gaza. A tremendous effort, that led to a tremendous result.

Now we already have a clear sign that in Rafah, the IDF will manage to persuade many, if not most, of its current residents to leave — because they are already, without prompting, leaving en masse. More on this movement can be found here:

Since the partial withdrawal of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from the Gaza Strip, approximately 250,000 Palestinians have relocated from the town of Rafah to other areas further north, particularly between Nuseirat and Khan Younes, south of the Wadi Gaza line.

That withdrawal of IDF troops from southern Gaza, and especially from the area around Khan Younis, began on April 7. In the two weeks since, 250,000 Gazans, without any IDF campaign to persuade them— no leaflets, messaging, or telephoning — have of their own volition done the intelligent thing, and left Rafah. They are now settled in tent cities — the IDF has provided tens of thousands of tents, and others have been supplied by UNRWA and other aid groups — without so far any problems of supplying shelter to those who have left Rafah.

This mass exodus follows the peak of the military operation in the Gaza Strip when Rafah was home to 1.3 million Palestinians.

Reports from Kan 11 channel indicate that Israel has approved an action plan in Rafah, allegedly in exchange for refraining from a large-scale attack against Iran. However, Biden administration officials have refuted these claims, stating that there has been no discussion of such a deal between Israel and the United States.

I believe the Israeli sources, who claim that there was an unspoken quid pro quo: Israel would hold back in its response to Iran’s attack, sending only a handful of missiles that were not intended to strike either army bases or nuclear facilities in Isfahan, but to come close enough to constitute a warning to Iran not to try Israel’s patience again. In return, the Israelis were given a signal that the Bidenites would drop their so far adamant opposition to an Israeli assault on Rafah. When this was reported by an Israeli television channel, Washington denied such an understanding had been reached with Israel, but it certainly makes perfect sense, and explains why the Israeli War Cabinet, that at first was determined to authorize a large-scale attack on Iran, changed its mind and settled for what was a symbolic attack on Isfahan that at the same time was a warning: we can strike deep into Iran, we can evade your missile defenses, and we will, if need be, destroy your nuclear program as we could have done the other day, beginning with the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

In response to the population movement, Israel has announced plans to establish 10,000 tents in the area outside Rafah within the next two weeks. Additionally, an additional 30,000 tents are being acquired for deployment at a later date….

Assuming one or two extended families — the Palestinians have very large families — in each tent, those 40,000 tents should be enough to shelter another 400,000 people. That means within a few weeks tent cities for 650,000 Gazans — half the population of Rafah a month ago — will have been set up. And all this is taking place as the Bidenites continue to say that achieving this mass movement of people out of Rafah “can’t be done” even as the IDF is doing that very thing.

The Israelis wanted to make sure that the Americans would support whatever measures they decided to take against Iran in response to Tehran’s large-scale attack on Israel on April 13, that failed so catastrophically. That Israeli response, carefully limited so that Iran could dismiss it as “pathetic” and not feel the need to respond, is now over, and Jerusalem can turn its full attention to the last battle of the Gaza War, in Rafah. The IDF needn’t empty the city altogether, but need only reduce the population to about half its current size, or even better, to its prewar size of 275,000. The movement of 250,000 Gazans out of Rafah in just two weeks, beginning on April 7, shows that this is an achievable aim. The IDF will again have managed to do what the Bidenites have insisted is “impossible.” After all, the IDF managed to persuade 900,000 people to leave northern Gaza before that area turned into a battlefield. Once another 400,000 Gazans leave Rafah, reducing the population to 650,000, that is, half its size a month ago, the Israelis will start their operations, of course leaving a safe corridor clear for more civilians to flee to central Gaza even after the battles start in Rafah. And then, the IDF will take apart the last four Hamas battalions, one by one.