Israel’s attack on Gaza’s last ‘safe zone’

Sam Hawley: Four months into the war, a large portion of Gaza has been levelled, with civilians fleeing to the south of the Strip to seek shelter. For a while, Israel declared the city of Rafah a safe zone, with more than a million people flocking there. But it’s now under attack, and there are fears a ground offensive could begin there soon. Today, reporter Nicole Johnston on the growing international calls for Israel to pull back, and what she saw during a rare trip inside Gaza. I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.

Sam Hawley: Nicole, you’re working at the ABC, of course, at the moment, and at Sky News UK, and you were based in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for about 12 years, and you’ve been to Gaza a lot of times, haven’t you?

Nicole Johnston: Yes, that’s right, actually. My first big break was really on the Gaza story. I went in 2010, I spent three months there, and then I was based there for a whole year in 2011, and I was the only foreign journalist in the Gaza Strip at the time.

News clip: Let’s get to Nicole Johnston now. She is live with us from Gaza. Nicole, if you would, what is the latest? Are the Israeli airstrikes continuing overnight?

News clip: In the last few minutes, we have heard about an airstrike. You probably just heard one of those airstrikes that I mentioned.

Nicole Johnston: And I’ve been back in 2012 and 2014 for the wars there, and I was recently back in the region in December in Jerusalem, reporting from there.

Sam Hawley: So you were over there reporting for Sky UK very recently, and you did get into Gaza. But before we talk about that, give me a sense of what Gaza was like when you were there before.

Nicole Johnston: Gaza was actually a really wonderful place to live. The hospitality of the Palestinian people was incredible. They’re in this really unique situation, closed off from the world. All of the borders are shut. So they’re so welcoming to any foreigners who are living there. It’s right on the Mediterranean Sea, so you get these great coastal breezes, beautiful beaches under normal circumstances, and a wonderful, rich sort of history and great Palestinian food and seafood. It’s incredibly densely populated, huge families of 10, 12 children. And that’s the thing that always really struck me about Gaza. Everywhere you look are children. You’re almost falling over for the number of children there.

Sam Hawley: Very different now, of course, and we’ll get to the destruction that we’ve seen there in a moment. It’s really hard right now, isn’t it, for international journalists to get into Gaza to report what’s going on on the ground at the moment, because the Israelis won’t allow it. But as we mentioned, you did enter Gaza. Just tell me about that. How did that come about?

Nicole Johnston: That’s right. Well, first I would say it’s not hard. It’s impossible, really, to go into Gaza, unless you go in on an Israeli military embed, and there aren’t very many of them. While I was in Jerusalem, we did go in on an embed just onto the other side of the Erez border crossing in the north of Gaza, and that was to see one of these large, sophisticated tunnels that Hamas had built.

Sam Hawley: So you’re embedded with the Israeli military, so it’s like a tour, basically.

Nicole Johnston: It’s a tour, because Israel’s argument, or one of its arguments for carrying out this war in Gaza, is that it wants to destroy the tunnel network, and there are hundreds of kilometres of tunnels underneath the Gaza Strip, and they are quite something to see. And I have been in some of Gaza’s tunnels before, but I had never seen one as well-built as this.

Nicole Johnston: It’s quite a metre or so above me. It’s wide enough to fit a vehicle through here, and Hamas has dug in. They have been building and preparing these tunnels for years.

Sam Hawley: So, the Israeli military wanted you to see this, wanted you to report it, that it’s a Hamas tunnel. They say there’s a huge network of them, of course, under Gaza. What they didn’t want you to see, or they didn’t show you, at least, was the rest of Gaza. So you didn’t see the destruction, but we know, don’t we, Nicole, that very large parts of Gaza are now destroyed.

Nicole Johnston: That’s right, we couldn’t see the destruction from where we were, but you could see it in the distance. The northern part of Gaza especially appears to have been completely devastated. We also know that by some of the reporting that’s been carried out by The New York Times and Associated Press, and some universities that have done satellite work, and they’re saying that two-thirds of buildings in the northern part of Gaza have been destroyed. Schools, hospitals, shops, buildings, apartment blocks, it’s all gone.

Sam Hawley: Now I want you to take me to Rafah, because a huge number of people have sought refuge there. Tell me about Rafah. Have you been there? What’s it like?

Nicole Johnston: Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time in Rafah over the years, especially at its border crossing, the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. It’s a small city, a few hundred thousand people, but now it has been completely transformed into this sort of teeming refugee camp, effectively, of more than one million people. And I was speaking with an Australian who is in charge of the Rafah border crossing only recently, and she said there is barely room to stand in Rafah. That’s how packed it is.

News clip: It’s almost standing room only. The whole society has just collapsed. I feel like I’m in the eye of a storm every minute of every day.

Nicole Johnston: People are there, because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

Sam Hawley: So, Nicole, Rafah was seen as this safe place for civilians, and as you said, a million people are seeking shelter there. But that all changed, didn’t it, when Israel began bombing the area last week? Just tell me about that.

Nicole Johnston: First, I would say it wasn’t seen as a safe place. It was seen as a place that was safer than the north. There was a big escalation on Sunday night, around 40 airstrikes, apparently. It turns out, according to the Israeli military, that they were carrying out those air raids as cover while they sent in special forces to try and rescue two Israeli hostages. They got those two hostages out, two elderly Israeli men, and took them back into Israel.

News clip: 60-year-old Fernando Simon-Marmon and 70-year-old Lewis Haar have now been reunited with their families in an Israeli hospital. //We saw them, a lot of tears, hugs, not many words

Nicole Johnston: But during these airstrikes, according to the Palestinian health officials, dozens of people were killed in Rafah. And of course, for the Palestinians, they fear that that is just the beginning once Israel decides to formally begin a ground war inside that city.

Sam Hawley: That’s the growing concern, isn’t it, that there will be a major ground offensive, and world leaders are pretty concerned about that.

Nicole Johnston: Yes, the rhetoric has really increased over the last couple of weeks with this rougher offensive looming. We’ve had the US President Joe Biden come out and say that it should only go ahead if Israel has a credible plan to evacuate.

Joe Biden: Many people there have been displaced, displaced multiple times, fleeing the violence to the north, and now they’re packed into Rafah, exposed and vulnerable. They need to be protected.

Nicole Johnston: In the UK, the foreign secretary has said that Israel should think very seriously about moving into Rafah. Even Germany has come out and raised concern about the operation and said that it could lead to a humanitarian catastrophe and that safe corridors need to be provided. So that’s one of the big questions. If Israel is so insistent on entering Rafah, what are they going to do about the one million people there?

Sam Hawley: Yeah, and our own Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, he was speaking on Radio 2GB and he was really demanding that Israel heed the international community’s warnings on this.

Anthony Albanese: Israel has a responsibility as a democratic nation to show care in relation to these innocent civilians.

Sam Hawley: Last weekend, Benjamin Netanyahu, he had an interview with Jonathan Karl, who’s the host of ABC America’s This Week program…

Jonathan Karl: They’re living in tents. Where are these people supposed to go?

Benjamin Netanyahu: Well, Rafah is a very small percentage of Gaza and I think it’s about 10 per cent or 15 per cent…

Jonathan Karl: Well, there’s an estimated 1.4 million people in that area right now.

Benjamin Netanyahu: No, well, the areas that we’ve cleared north of Rafah, Plenty of areas there…Plenty of areas there…

Sam Hawley: He actually said that he wants to protect civilians there.

Benjamin Netanyahu: We’re not… We’re not cavalier about this. This is part of our war effort to get civilians out of harm’s way. It’s part of Hamas’s effort to keep them in harm’s way.

Sam Hawley: But obviously, the international community is not certain of that.

Nicole Johnston: They’re not certain of how he’s going to protect civilians. Netanyahu is saying that he will create a safe passage or a corridor to move people out of Rafah into the central part or to the north. The question is, how do you move more than one million people? People who are weak, who are hungry, people who are injured, how do you get them on a road and get them out of there?

Sam Hawley: Alright, so, Nicole, let’s look now at what we should expect next, I suppose. The world is clearly worried about civilian casualties. Ceasefire talks collapsed altogether between Israel and Hamas. Is there anything that would stop Benjamin Netanyahu going down this path for a ground offensive in Rafah, do you think?

Nicole Johnston: Well, the ceasefire talks do appear to be back on because we have the head of the CIA and Mossad now in Cairo. And only in the last couple of days, Joe Biden said that a deal is on the table, a deal for a six-week pause. We don’t know if that’s going to happen. And it’s difficult to read into the mind of Netanyahu. He is so adamant that there will be a military offensive in Rafah that it is hard to see him pulling back.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Our heroic fighters are now fighting in Khan Yunis, the main stronghold of Hamas. We instructed the IDF to prepare to operate also in Rafah and in two of the camps in the centre, the last remaining strongholds of Hamas.

Nicole Johnston: The idea of him signing up to any deal that would lead to a longer-term ceasefire or a permanent ceasefire, which is what Hamas wants, is very unlikely.

Sam Hawley: If it does go ahead, this ground offensive, tell me, Nicole, will this be the last major front of this war, or is there still more to come? It’s hard to fathom that there’s more after this.

Nicole Johnston: It’s difficult to know. It’s hard to see what other front there could possibly be in Gaza because you can see that the Israelis have essentially started at the top of the Gaza Strip in the north, and they’ve worked their way down. They’re preparing to go into Rafah. There is nowhere else for them to go. This is the last border town before you reach Egypt. So Rafah should be the end of it. The problem for Israel is it hasn’t managed to get any of the big leaders of Hamas. Israel has said that it will go after the leaders of Hamas wherever they are. Well, they’re in Lebanon, they’re in Qatar, they’re in Egypt. So new fronts or targeted assassinations or killing could continue. The entire region is unstable, and any one of these attacks could be the spark that leads to a much wider war, and that is what the international community and the Arab world is worried about.

Sam Hawley: Nicole Johnston is a reporter for the ABC and Sky News UK. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald and Nell Whitehead. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, please email us on abcnewsdaily at abc.net.au. Thanks for listening.