Expensive food and miserable living conditions – what is Mavasi, where Israel encourages Palestinians to evacuate / Article

Rafah is currently home to approximately 1.3 million Palestinians. This is more than half of the population of the Gaza Strip. Israeli tanks rolled into this Gaza City on Tuesday morning, raising concerns around the world for the safety of civilians there.

Israel has given them the order to evacuate and move to nearby settlements – Hanyounis and Mavasi. Israel has designated Mavasi as a safe zone. An improvised tent camp is currently located there, but the living conditions there are deplorable. Israel, however, claimed that the camp would be expanded and equipped with field hospitals, materials for human shelters and other necessities.

Meanwhile, the United Nations (UN) and other aid organizations have warned that Mavasi is not ready to host tens of thousands of asylum seekers.

Mawasi stretches about 8 kilometers along the coastline from the southern Gaza city of Rafah to the second largest southern city of Hanyounis.

At the start of the war, Israel unilaterally declared the area a “humanitarian zone” and promised its residents that they would be safe there. Mawasi is now home to more than 450,000 displaced Palestinians, including many who arrived there in recent months as Israel stepped up its ground offensive in central and southern Gaza, according to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, the Associated Press reported.

UNRWA also did not support preparations in Mawasi because it did not want to encourage people to move to an area that was not ready to receive them, said Scott Anderson, the agency’s director in the Gaza Strip. But UNRWA promised to provide assistance to the people who arrive there.

People who have already settled in Mavasi said that there is a lack of toilets and very little drinking water available.

To avoid long queues at public toilets and to maintain privacy, many relieve themselves in pits dug by their tents. Palestinians, in a conversation with journalists of the news agency “Associated Press”, also indicated that they sometimes wait for hours to receive drinking water from tanks that are delivered to different parts of the camp.

Although people in these camps have access to basic assistance and a living wage, those who have the means can also purchase various additional goods.

In the Mavasi camp, there are several stalls selling tent-building equipment, canned goods and vegetables, such as tomatoes and potatoes, at inflated prices.

A kilogram of potatoes costs about 5.5 euros there. People say that building a large tent from wood and nylon costs about 465 euros, but buying a ready-made tent costs about twice as much.

“More than 400,000 people have flooded the Mavasi district,” UNRWA chief Philip Lazarini wrote on the “X” website. “It cannot accommodate more people and is no safer than other parts of Gaza.”

CONTEXT:

On October 7, 2023, “Hamas” carried out a massacre in Israel, murdering around 1,200 people, the absolute majority of whom were civilians. About 250 more people, including women, children and old people, were taken hostage by the terrorists and taken to the Gaza Strip.

Israel responded with a military operation in the Gaza Strip, and also increased its presence in the West Bank, promising to destroy the terrorist group Hamas.

So far, more than 33,000 people, mostly women and children, have died in the Gaza Strip, according to data from the Hamas-run Health Ministry, and the UN has warned of the growing threat of famine there.

The international community, including a number of Israel’s allies, have repeatedly pointed out Tel Aviv’s disproportionate response to the terrorist attack, but the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue the fight for the elimination of “Hamas” in the Gaza Strip.