Rafah, Gaza Strip – The rooms and corridors of Rafah’s El-Amal Rehabilitation Society, a two-storey building in a sunny yard filled with trees, and a children’s play area off to the side, are as lively as they have ever been.
But instead of it being just the deaf students who are usually bustling around, the classrooms are occupied by families fleeing Israel’s relentless assault on the people of Gaza.
Rafah, at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt, now hosts some 1.5 million people displaced by the endless, indiscriminate Israeli bombing from other parts of the Gaza Strip into an area of about 63sq km (24sq miles).
The first arrivals poured into the fixed structures: homes of friends or family, abandoned buildings, and schools that were not in use because Israel’s war on Gaza had paralysed life.
Some of the schools were run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) but the agency is no longer able to fully operate them as shelters as it did several times before during previous Israeli assaults on Gaza.
Rafah is estimated to have about 15 buildings that can be used as shelters, each of which can house about 3,000 people. This makes for a total of 45,000 displaced people that the city can cope with. Today, each school building is home to up to 25,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs).
The unprecedented influx of people prompted the independent El-Amal Society management to open its doors to IDPs, seeing the dire need as families came to Rafah on foot, carrying, pushing, or pulling those who could not walk, holding on to whatever meagre possessions they could save.
Families like that of journalist Abdul Rahman Mahani, 24, who all live in a single room. He was displaced along with his parents, brother and two sisters, but this was not their first displacement.
They had fled the vicious bombing on their neighbourhood of Remal in the west of Gaza City to the doomed al-Shifa Hospital and finally down to Rafah.
“In the dark of night, we heard the frantic voices of neighbours yelling: ‘Evacuate! Evacuate!’” Mahani told Al Jazeera of a night when he and his family fled. “Amid the Israeli raids, we all rushed to seek refuge at al-Shifa Hospital.”
From al-Shifa they soon had to relocate, to the Nassr neighbourhood this time, and Mahani remembers making the…