The children hear the dogs snarling outside, just beyond the flimsy plastic of the tent.
The seven children of Rehab Abu Daqqa crowd around their mother. She is the last safe harbour in their lives. They have shared things, these children and their mother, which cannot be communicated to those who have not seen the things they have seen. Is there a word to express what a child feels knowing that just a few yards away, animals are dragging a body from a grave?
The vocabulary of childhood is inadequate amid the horrors of this emergency cemetery in Rafah.
Scared is the word Rehab Abu Daqqa uses.
WARNING: This report contains descriptions some readers may find disturbing
That is accurate. But there is more to it, she knows. The children have seen dogs eating the bodies. A human leg lying by a fence. So yes they are scared. But revolted too, and uncomprehending. The children who once had a home, went to school, lived according to the established rhythms of their family and community, are now refugees in a place that reeks of death.
"This morning the dogs took out a body from one of the graves and were eating it," Rehab Abu Daqqa says. "From night until dawn the dogs do not let us sleep… our children keep holding on to me because of how scared they are."
The dogs come in packs of dozens. Domestic pets whose owners are dead or displaced, mixed with Rafah's existing population of strays, all of them now feral and scavenging for whatever they can eat. The cemetery has numerous shallow graves where people place their dead until a time comes when they can be taken to their home area. On some graves relatives have placed bricks to try to keep the dogs away from the dead.
Rehab Abu Daqqa is gaunt and exhausted. Her mouth and nose are covered by cloth to fend off the stench of the graves. She praises the young men who came earlier to reinter a body dragged out that morning.
"I don't accept that me or my children should live next to a cemetery. My child is in the 3rd grade and today instead of playing a game he was drawing a grave and in the middle he drew a dead body. These are the children of Palestine… What can I tell you? Miserable, the word miserable doesn't even explain it."
The cemetery is one of several in Gaza that has become a refuge for people whose homes have been destroyed in the fighting. There are more than 1.4 million people crowded into Rafah - five times its pre-war population. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council that works out at 22,000 people for every square kilometre. Already disease is spreading, with outbreaks of diarrhoea, hepatitis A, and meningitis - as well as a continuing hunger crisis.
Rafah is where the refugees of Gaza reach the final wall, the border with Egypt which is closed to the overwhelming majority of the displaced. They arrive after being pushed from one place to another by the advance of the Israeli forces. Rehab Abu Daqqa has fled three times already and may soon have to uproot her family again if the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) offensive on Rafah goes ahead.
Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said a military operation in Rafah will go ahead "with or without" a ceasefire to destroy what he says are four Hamas battalions in the city. Hamas insists there can be no deal without a commitment to permanently end the war. Far right members of the Israeli coalition cabinet are warning Mr Netanyahu against compromise. The Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a standard bearer for the settler movement, has called for "absolute destruction" in Rafah, saying there can be no "half work".
"Where do they [refugees] move to? " asks Dr Rik Peeperkorn, regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO), who recently returned from Rafah.