Haroun Waleed Haroun Al-Karnab, 29 years old, freelance journalist, married and father of one child, resident of Tel Al-Sultan neighbourhood, Rafah.
Testimony Date: 23 April 2025
I was forcibly displaced along with my family, consisting of five members, from our home in Tel Al-Sultan, Rafah City, at the end of May 2024. Due to the Israeli military ground invasion in Rafah, we fled under heavy shelling and gunfire. I could not carry many of my essential belongings, especially my protective vest and helmet necessary for my work as a journalist.
We took shelter in a tent at Salam Camp, next to the Sharia Court in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis. Life in the displacement camp was extremely difficult and filled with sorrow, particularly after the death of my father, Waleed Haroun Al-Karnab, on 5 October 2024. However, amid the hardship, my first child, Waleed, was born, and he is now eight months old.
At the end of January 2025, following the ceasefire agreement that began on 19 January 2025, my family and I returned to our home in Tel Al-Sultan, despite the partial damage it had sustained from the Israeli shelling. We cleaned the house temporarily and resettled in it. However, even during the ceasefire, Israeli forces continued bombarding and shooting, resulting in several deaths and injuries among residents in Canada/Tel Al-Sultan, Saudi, and Furqan neighbourhoods in western Rafah.
On Sunday, 23 March 2025, around 5:00 a.m., we woke up to continuous gunfire, artillery shelling, airstrikes, helicopter attacks, and quad copter drone fire. I called several journalist friends to understand the situation and learned that Israeli special forces had invaded the area and that contact had been lost with ambulances and civil defense crews.
Around 8:30 a.m., Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets ordering residents of Tel Al-Sultan to evacuate their homes and head towards Al-Mawasi via Gush Katif Road (the former settlement road in southern Gaza) on foot, with no use of vehicles.
I left with my family—my wife Sarah, my baby Waleed, my mother Ibtisam, my brother Mahmoud, my uncle Shadi, and his wife Abeer. We could only carry small bags with some clothes. As we walked, we saw our neighbours also evacuating, and we moved toward Dar Al-Fadila School Street and Helmi Saqr Mosque in northern Tel Al-Sultan. There, thousands of people, including women, children, and the elderly, were gathered, walking towards the road of the former settlements northwest of Rafah.
During the forcible displacement, I saw an elderly woman who could not walk and was crawling on her hands and knees like a child—it was a heartbreaking sight. One of our neighbours, a woman from the Jouda family, walked next to us, although she had been shot in her legs by an Israeli drone. I do not know how she managed to keep walking. I also witnessed a young man with a chest injury; another youth carried him for hundreds of metres until an ambulance managed to reach him.
Later, I learned he had succumbed to his wounds a few days later. Along the way, many people fainted or collapsed from exhaustion, hunger (as it was Ramadan), fear, and fatigue. Some were forced to abandon their bags and belongings while fleeing under direct Israeli drone fire.
We managed to cross the road of the former settlements and reach Al-Teenah Street north of Rafah, connecting to southern Khan Younis. The road was bulldozed, filled with trenches and barriers, making it extremely difficult to pass. Eventually, we arrived at the Regional area in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, despite the presence of Israeli tanks and soldiers stationed just 100 metres away near the UN warehouses. At that time, checkpoints for forcibly displaced persons from Tel Al-Sultan, Saudi, and Furqan neighbourhoods had not yet been established.
I returned to stay at Salam Camp beside the Sharia Court in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, for the second time following this second displacement, just as I had after the first displacement in May 2024.
A few days after settling again in Salam Camp, my uncle Imad Al-Karnab informed me that his son, Kareem Al-Karnab, 23 years old and a third-year medical student, had been arrested during the forced displacement and remains detained. My uncle learned this information through another detainee who had been released from Negev Prison inside Israel.
According to what I later heard, Israeli forces had detained several young men as they crossed the checkpoint they established at the exit of Tel Al-Sultan neighbourhood during the most recent incursion on 23 March 2025—including two of my friends.
