https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/israel-has-wiped-the-city-of-rafah
The city was once designated a safe zone...
Ricky Hale
and Council Estate Media
Apr 05, 2025

The city of Rafah was built over 3,300 years ago.

The first recorded mention of it was in 1,303 BC.

It was the first stop on Pharoah Shoshenq 1’s campaign to the Levant in 925 BC.

It was depicted on the Map of Madaba mosaic in the early Byzantine Church of St George in Jordan.

It was documented by Greek geographer Strabo in his work Geographica which was first published in 7 BC.

Rafah had a long and beautiful history that would be loved by anyone with a connection to the land, that would be appreciated by any thinking, feeling human being.

Rafah had a population of 171,889, and as recently as February, 1.4 million Palestinians were sheltering there. It was the “safe zone” near the Egyptian border that civilians were ordered to flee to.

This is what Rafah looks like today:

The city of Rafah is no more. It has been reduced to rubble by a settler-colony established just 77 years ago. All of the historical buildings, the archaeological sites, the museums, the modern homes, the civilian infrastructure, the shops, cafes, restaurants, hospitals, schools, and universities, all the beautiful places that contained so many memories are all gone. Nothing seems to have been spared, not the Roman coins, not the Byzantine ceramics, not the granite pillars of ancient temples…

Israel has seized the ruins of Rafah, and ordered every survivor out, to create a “security zone”. The name for that process is ethnic cleansing. Israel is demolishing the few buildings that somehow remain standing after the bombardment. The goal is to leave Gaza no more habitable than the deserts of Mars and claim the survivors voluntarily left. The rebuilding effort would be almost equivalent to terraforming, such would be the effort required.

Remember when we said “all eyes on Rafah”? Well, we looked away and Israel did what Israel has always wanted to do. And if you think this apocalyptic destruction was a reaction to October 7th, just know that back in 1971, then-General Ariel Sharon destroyed 500 Palestinian houses in refugee camps, displacing 4,000 Palestinians to create patrol roads for the Israeli military. Rafah, like everywhere in Gaza, has known only Israeli brutality for decades.

Rafah has been destroyed so thoroughly that they might as well have used a nuclear bomb, the only difference being the colonisers don’t feel the effects of radiation. I suspect if there was such a thing as radiation-free nukes, Israel would have used them many times over by now, and our disgusting leaders would simply have said Israel has a right to defend itself.

Remember when those disgusting podcasters were fantasising about pushing a button to erase all Palestinians? Those podcasters were not extreme outliers, they were typical Zionists, a fact they themselves admitted. Most Zionists, an overwhelming majority, would hit that button in a heartbeat. Most Zionists will be delighted that Rafah is gone.

We are talking about people who have been gloating on social media, gleeful that the IDF just took out the grandson of a Hamas leader - that grandson was two years old. What a truly impressive victory that must have been for the IDF. I can only imagine it was a harrowing battle for the TikTok warriors…

Rafah is the place where Israel was murdering rescuers and throwing them in mass graves for the alleged crime of not having lights on their emergency vehicles switched on.

Yes, the IDF really justified murdering rescuers by claiming their clearly-marked vehicles did not have lights switched on and it made them feel scared. Scared enough to carry out executions.

Even if that dreadful excuse were true, it would still not absolve the soldiers of murder, yet it somehow gets worse: footage shows those lights were switched on. The rescue vehicles were driving normally along a road with clear visibility when Israel decided to strike. The rescuers were wearing reflective clothing so this was not a case of mistaken identity. It was not a decision made in panic, it was made in cold blood.

The shooting went on for five minutes and the paramedic filming from his phone before his death said: “Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose - to help people. Allahu akbar.”

The footage was presented to the UN Security Council by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society during a press conference, having been verified by The New York Times. This was a crime even the mainstream media could not bring itself to conceal.

It must be hard for Israel to keep coming up with dreadful excuses that keep getting shown to be lies. I guess it was easier to wipe Rafah off the map and erase the evidence.

If Zionist colonisers had any genuine connection to the land, they would not have erased such a significant part of its history. If your fantasy is to erase the history of a land and build something new and act like what came before never existed, you are an invader, a conqueror.

When you destroy a city, you don’t get to use words like “precision-targeting”, you don’t get to pretend you’re minimising harm to civilians, you don’t get to pretend there were tunnels under all of those buildings, you don’t get to pretend every last building was a Hamas HQ, you certainly don’t get to use words like “proportionate”. There is no legal or moral defence for what we have witnessed. It was a crime we allowed Israel to carry out, but we cannot allow the world to forget. We cannot allow the culprits to get away with it.

Israelis are genocidal colonisers. They are thieves of history. And they must be held accountable.