'Where do we go?': Desperation grows in Rafah as Israeli ground assault looms

Gaza’s southernmost city is crammed with displaced, desperate and starving people, just as Israel threatens a fresh assault.

Rafah had a prewar population of around 250,000. Today the city on the Gaza-Egypt border has swelled to an estimated 1.4 million — more than half of Gaza’s population — many of them Palestinian civilians who fled the rest of the enclave as it was being bombed and partially demolished by Israeli forces.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is signaling that Rafah may be the target of his next military offensive, which he says is a necessary step toward toppling Hamas. Displaced and trapped inside a city just a few miles wide, Palestinians sheltering there are now asking a seemingly unanswerable question.

“Where do we go?” Wissam Al-Arkan, 37, who has already moved twice inside Gaza since Oct. 7, told NBC News. “We came to Rafah and now they are threatening to invade it.”

This week, thousands of people are preparing to flee again, packing tents pitched on muddy ground between Rafah’s buildings and walls. They live among tangled, rusty wire, piles of trash and other detritus of war. Some concrete buildings are charred by blasts; others are wrecked. Some children play a game, throwing this blast debris against a wall. Adults sift through the dust and rubble for anything worth salvaging.

Overhead is the ubiquitous whine of Israeli drones.

Al-Arkan is among the people who are dispossessed, packing up his belongings for the third time during this conflict, zig-zagging a slice of land just twice the size of Washington, D.C. This time he has bought a tuk tuk — a small, three-wheeled taxi — on which to load his possessions.

“We feel hopeless. What do we do?” he said.

Israel now controls swaths of