The prospect of a “real” attack by the Israeli army in Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have taken refuge, is “terrifying”, the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said yesterday on Monday.

“Given the bloodshed that Gaza has suffered so far, we can fully imagine what will happen in Rafah,” Volker Turk warned, according to a press release issued by his services in Geneva.

“A possible real military invasion of Rafah — where some 1.5 million Palestinians have piled up with the Egyptian border behind them and no place to escape to — is terrifying,” he explained. The threatened attack would result in “an extremely high number of civilians, once again mainly women and children, likely to be killed and injured.”

The war broke out on October 7 when members of the Palestinian Islamist movement’s military wing Hamas launched an unprecedented raid from the Gaza Strip against southern sectors of the Israeli territory, killing more than 1,160 people, most of them civilians, according to a count of Agence France-Presse based on official announcements by the Israeli authorities.

In retaliation, Israel’s military is conducting large-scale military operations in the Palestinian enclave that have so far killed more than 28,300 people, the vast majority of them women and children, according to the latest casualty count released by Hamas’ health ministry. .

The High Commissioner also expressed concern about the impact an Israeli attack on Rafah would have on the humanitarian aid on which the survival of most of the residents of the small coastal Palestinian enclave depends.

“The raid on Rafah could also mean the end of what little humanitarian aid is coming in and being distributed (to the Gaza Strip), which would have huge consequences for the whole of it,” above all “for the hundreds of thousands of people who are at risk of dying of hunger” in its northern part, he emphasized.

“The world must not allow this to happen,” he added, once again calling for an “immediate ceasefire.” At the same time, Mr. Turk demanded the release of “all remaining hostages.”

The Israeli authorities estimate that approximately 130 hostages remain in the hands of Hamas, of which, according to a military representative, 31 are dead, out of a total of approximately 250 that were kidnapped on October 7. A week-long truce in late November allowed the release of more than 105 hostages and in return 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. On both sides, it was mostly women and children.