DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The Israeli military on Monday issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation in the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.
Israel ended its ceasefire with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month. At the beginning of March it cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to accept changes to the truce agreement.
The evacuation orders appeared to cover nearly all of the city and nearby areas. The military ordered Palestinians to head to Muwasi, a sprawl of squalid tent camps along the coast. The orders came during Eid Al-Fitr, a normally festive Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Israel launched a major operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, last May, leaving large parts of it in ruins. The military seized a strategic corridor along the border as well as the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world that was not controlled by Israel.
Israel was supposed to withdraw from the corridor under the ceasefire it signed with Hamas in January under US pressure, but it later refused to, citing the need to prevent weapons smuggling.
Israel has vowed to intensify its military operations until Hamas releases the remaining 59 hostages it holds — 24 of whom are believed to be alive. Israel has also demanded that Hamas disarm and leave the territory, conditions that were not included in the ceasefire agreement and which Hamas has rejected.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would take charge of security in Gaza after the war and implement US President Donald Trump’s proposal to resettle Gaza’s population in other countries, describing it as “voluntary emigration.”
That plan has been universally rejected by Palestinians, who view it as forcible expulsion from their homeland, and human rights experts say it would likely violate international law.
Hamas, meanwhile, has insisted on implementing the signed agreement, which called for the remainder of the hostages to be released in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli pullout. Negotiations over those parts of the agreement were supposed to have begun in February but only preliminary talks have been held.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rampaging through army bases and farming communities and killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The militants took another 251 people hostage, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. At its height, the war had displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s population, with many fleeing multiple times.
Large areas of Gaza have been completely destroyed, and it’s unclear how or when anything will be rebuilt.

KAFR ABU SHANAB, Egypt: For almost two years, Emad Mouawad had been repeatedly shuttled from one Sudanese paramilitary-run detention center to another, terrified each day would be his last.
The 44-year-old Egyptian merchant spent years selling home appliances in neighboring Sudan before fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed his Khartoum home in June 2023, taking him and six others into custody.
“They accused us of being Egyptian spies,” he told AFP, back home in Kafr Abu Shanab, a quiet village in Egypt’s Fayoum governorate southwest of Cairo.
The RSF has accused Egypt of involvement in the war, which Cairo has denied.
“We were just traders, but to them, every Egyptian was a suspect,” said Mouawad, recalling how his captors searched their phones and home.
They found nothing, but that did not spare the group, who were blindfolded, crammed into a truck and driven to one of the RSF’s many detention sites in Khartoum.
It was two months into the RSF’s war with the army, and hundreds of thousands of people had already fled to the Egyptian border, seeking safety.
“We couldn’t just go and leave our things to be looted,” said Mouawad.
“We had debts to pay, we had to guard our cargo at any cost.”

Cell without windows

In a university building-turned-prison in the Sudanese capital’s Riyadh district, Mouawad was confined with eight other Egyptians in a three-by-three-meter (10-by-10-feet) cell without any windows.
Other cells held anywhere between 20 and 50 detainees, he said, including children as young as six and elderly men, some of them in their 90s.
Food, when it came, “wasn’t food,” said Ahmed Aziz, another Egyptian trader detained with Mouawad.
“They would bring us hot water mixed with wheat flour. Just sticky, tasteless paste,” Aziz told AFP.
Water was either brackish and polluted from a well, or silt-filled from the Nile.
Disease spread unchecked, and many did not survive.
“If you were sick, you just waited for death,” Aziz said.
According to Mouawad, “people started losing their immunity, they became nothing but skeletons.”
“Five — sometimes more, sometimes fewer — died every day.”
Their bodies were often left to rot in the cells for days, their fellow detainees laying beside them.
And “they didn’t wash the bodies,” Mouawad said, an important Muslim custom before a dignified burial.
Instead, he heard that the paramilitaries just “dumped them in the desert.”

Living nightmare
Mouawad and Aziz were among tens of thousands vanished into prisons run by both the RSF and the rival Sudanese army, according to a UN report issued earlier this month.
Since the war began in April 2023, activists have documented the detention and torture of frontline aid workers, human rights defenders and random civilians.
The UN report said the RSF has turned residential buildings, police stations and schools into secret prisons.
Often snatched off the streets, detainees were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labor.
The army has also been accused of torture, including severe beatings and electric shocks.
Neither the army nor the RSF responded to AFP requests for comment.
Soba, an infamous RSF prison in southern Khartoum, may have held more than 6,000 detainees by mid-2024, the UN said.
Aziz, who was held there for a month, described a living nightmare.
“There were no toilets, just buckets inside the cell that would sit there all day,” he said.
“You couldn’t go two weeks without falling sick,” Aziz added, with rampant fevers spreading fear of cholera and malaria.
At night, swarms of insects crawled over the prisoners.
“There was nothing that made you feel human,” said Aziz.
Mohamed Shaaban, another Egyptian trader, said RSF guards at Soba routinely insulted and beat them with hoses, sticks and whips.
“They stripped us naked as the day we were born,” Shabaan, 43, told AFP.
“Then they beat us, insulted and degraded us.”

RSF war crimes
Both the RSF and the army have been accused of war crimes, including torturing civilians.
Mohamed Osman, a Sudanese researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while “the army at least has a legal framework in place,” the RSF “operates with complete impunity.”
The paramilitary force “runs secret facilities where people are taken and often never seen again,” Osman told AFP.
Despite their ordeals, Mouawad, Aziz and Shaaban were among the luckier ones, being released after 20 months in what they believe was a joint intelligence operation between Egypt and Sudan’s army-aligned authorities.
Finally back home in Egypt, they are struggling to recover, both physically and mentally, “but we have to try to turn the page and move on,” said Shaaban.
“We have to try and forget.”