Israel's Rafah offensive: 'Gaza will become uninhabitable', NGO says Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to launch a ground assault in Gaza's southern city of Rafah despite ongoing truce talks with Hamas. If Israeli ground forces invade Rafah, “Gaza will become uninhabitable in the sense that the whole infrastructure of the Gaza Strip would have been destroyed,” warned Oliver Mcternan, director of NGO Forward Thinking. “We’ve got, for the sake of humanity, to have a ceasefire,” he said.