 "‘All Eyes on Rafah’ has taken over social media: Where and how did it all start?")
Israeli tanks have reached the centre of Rafah in Gaza on Tuesday (28 May) despite mounting international opposition to the operation. According to a Times of Israel report, tanks were seen near the Al-Awda mosque, a central Rafah landmark.
At the same time, all of social media — X, Instagram, and TikTok — has lit up with a social media trend, ‘All Eyes on Rafah’, drawing at least 29 million shares on Instagram in less than 24 hours. The slogan and the accompanying image on Instagram is picking up steam across the world, particularly in parts of Europe, Australia and India as a call for awareness of the ongoing war.
We take a closer look at where exactly does the slogan stem from and why it’s suddenly drawing so much attention on social media.
What’s ‘All eyes on Rafah’ all about?
If you scrolled through Instagram in the past 24 hours, there’s an almost 100 per cent chance you came upon someone posting an image, that read, All Eyes of Rafah.
In fact, on Tuesday, Bollywood A-listers such as Alia Bhatt, Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor, Varun Dhawan, Rashmika Mandanna, Sonakshi Sinha, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Triptii Dimri, Dia Mirza and Richa Chadha among many others had posted the image to their Instagram Stories, expressing their solidarity with Palestinians.
For those who haven’t seen it, the image depicts tents in a camp arranged to spell out “All Eyes on Rafah,” an area in the south of Gaza filled with refugee tent camps where local officials said at least 45 civilians died after an Israeli strike on Sunday.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsWhat sets apart this imagery from the others is that it doesn’t showcase the violence that is occurring on the ground. Moreover, the image, now going viral, appears to have been created by artificial intelligence. Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who studies misinformation, told NBC News that the image “definitely looks” AI-generated.
Among the signs the image was AI-generated are that it does not appear photorealistic, it includes unusual shadows, and the tent camp pictured is unnaturally sprawling and symmetrical — a sign of pattern repetition that is common in AI generation.
**Also read: Why people are using watermelon emojis to support Palestine**But where does the phrase ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ come from? A Forbes report states that the slogan stems from a comment made by Rick Peeperkorn, director of the World Health Organization’s Office of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In February, he had said “all eyes are on Rafah” after Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered an evacuation plan for the city ahead of its attacks to eliminate the remaining strongholds of militant group Hamas.
Human rights groups such as Oxfam, Save the Children and others who have used it since say that the phrase is an appeal to the millions of people across the world to not ignore what’s happening in the city of Rafah, as Israel continues its offensive despite the large civilian population.
Israeli airstrikes on Sunday killed at least 45 people in a camp for displaced Palestinians. Today there are reports of a further 21 killed.
— Save the Children UK (@savechildrenuk) May 28, 2024
We strongly condemn these horrific attacks, and the catastrophic ground incursion in Rafah.
This war on children must stop.
The UK must… pic.twitter.com/PaVz2bPRIV
What’s going on in Rafah?
Rafah , located in southern Gaza, is close to the border with Egypt. In 2017, it was estimated to have a population of 1,71,889. By February, however, this number had increased to 1.4 million as Palestinians fled from the north of the region to escape the bombardment as a result of the war.
Fighting in Rafah has caused more than one million Palestinians to flee, most of whom had already been displaced in the war between Israel and Hamas. Moreover, a dire humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the region as people struggle with limited food resources.
And on Sunday, the situation worsened when 45 people in a tent camp for displaced Palestinians were killed, with hundreds of others injured with severe burns, fractures and wounds owing to Israeli strikes.
Chaotic scenes unfolded from the Rafah camp with eyewitnesses recounting the horror. “We saw charred bodies and dismembered limbs … We also saw cases of amputations, wounded children, women and the elderly,” Mohammad al-Mughayyir, a Gaza civil defence agency official told AFP.
Footage shared on social media showed horrific scenes from the site, including a man holding what seemed to be the headless body of a small child, reported NBC News.
Following the strike, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that “something unfortunately went tragically wrong” with the airstrike. “We are investigating the incident and will reach conclusions, because this is our policy,” he said.
Notably, the strike, which has been dubbed as one of the deadliest single incidents in the ongoing war, came two days after the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered the Jewish nation to stop its operation in Rafah immediately.
The incident also sparked international condemnation with director of planning for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees Sam Rose, telling the BBC: “We cannot dismiss this as a simple accident. Women and children were killed in the most gruesome, the most brutal, of circumstances.”
Germany too commented on the matter, saying: “The image of charred bodies, including children, from the airstrike in Rafah are unbearable.”
What about the US?
While countries condemned Israel’s actions in Rafah, the United States has said that recent Israeli operations and attacks in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah do not constitute a major ground operation that crosses any US red lines, and that it is also closely monitoring a probe into Sunday’s deadly strike on a tent camp it called “tragic”.
US national security council spokesperson John Kirby said to reporters: “The Israelis have said this is a tragic mistake.” And when asked about the tanks rolling into the Gazan city, Kirby said: “We don’t support, we won’t support a major ground operation in Rafah.
“We haven’t seen that happen at this point. We have not seen them smash into Rafah.
“We have not seen them go in with large units, large numbers of troops, in columns and formations in some sort of co-ordinated manoeuvre against multiple targets on the ground.”
With inputs from agencies
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