Dina Mahmoud (Gaza, London)
“A sea of tents.” This is how humanitarian relief teams describe many neighborhoods in the city of Rafah in the far south of the Gaza Strip, after the city became a refuge for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the bombing and ground operations taking place in various areas of the Strip.
The latest estimates indicate that Rafah now includes more than a million displaced people taking shelter there, in addition to its population, which was estimated at about 270 thousand people before the outbreak of the war, which has made the temporary shelter centers run by relief organizations, schools, hospitals, and government facility buildings there, crowded with their residents. .
Amid international warnings about the overcrowding of the shelter centers run by the international organization in Rafah far beyond their capacity, in addition to the overcrowding of residential apartments with dozens of people per apartment, a large number of displaced people were forced to set up camps in any area of the city, to the point of setting up their tents on top of the rubble of buildings. The destroyer, which some consider may be safer than others, as they rule out that it will be exposed again to air strikes or artillery shelling.
Some displaced people take refuge in Rafah, for some of whom this city represents their fourth or fifth stop on their displacement journey, and they are unable to find a tent to stay in. They take refuge in any place where they can take cover with wooden boards or even with nylon bags used to pack relief supplies that arrive. To the Gaza Strip via trucks passing through the Rafah crossing.
The crisis led to a boom in the trade in these bags, in addition to some making a living from knitting and sewing them and making them resemble the tents in which the displaced usually stay.
The price of one of these tents, which was equivalent to $50 for the most expensive and high-quality ones in the pre-war period, has risen to more than 6 times this amount sometimes at the present time.
This is of course due to the increasing demand for tents and the shortage of available ones.
While some displaced people say that they received tents from relief agencies after a waiting period that lasted for some time, others complain that they have been waiting to receive such support for several weeks to no avail.
It is no longer strange, in light of this atmosphere, that social media users in Rafah, when they are not cut off from communications and internet services, find advertisements on these platforms for renting or selling tents.
While some of them consider that this represents an indication that the tent crisis is being exploited by some of them as a means of profiting and taking advantage of the war conditions, others confirm, in statements published on the website of National Public Radio in the United States, that the matter is nothing more than that they are forced to sell their tents or Renting them, in order to buy for themselves and their families the food, water, and basic materials they need.
At the same time, other displaced people are trying to confront this worsening crisis by using ordinary fabrics and rugs to make tents from them, while a third group had no choice but to use the large fabrics that cover the aid trucks that enter Gaza daily by land to make their own tents. .
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