First moments after yesterday’s warning from Israel to the residents of the north of the Gaza Strip to leave their homes within 24 hours and go to the south of the enclave. Majid and his family, who are in Beit Lahiya and are a five-minute drive from the separation fence in the north, are still undecided: “They want us to evacuate. I don’t know what we’ll do, but we don’t want to go out,” he says.
At that moment, every second that passed in the Gaza Strip was vital. The difference between one more bomb, one more body to dig up from the rubble, the last light and the last WhatsApp connection. And then, also, the decision to move. Eight hours passed between question and answer when a new message arrived from Dr. Salah al-Susi: “Let’s try to talk. We are alive by miracle”.
Local journalists, humanitarian organizations and more than two million residents of Gaza – half of them children – are the eyes and voices of the side of the conflict where we cannot enter. On Monday, Israel decided to cut off fuel, food and basic supplies from Gaza, where it maintains a complete siege and relentless bombardment. Israel added the devastating element of a ground operation in the strip.
While Hamas asked the people of Gaza to remain “firm”, the United Nations warned that it was “impossible” to evacuate 1.1 million people – practically half of the population of Gaza – “without devastating humanitarian consequences”, which could “transform this tragedy into a calamitous situation”. And this while the bombs keep falling.
It is with the aerial projectiles, from the sea and from tanks that the witnesses begin their telephone accounts. Al-Susi, thanks to the battery of a friend’s cell phone, describes “massive destruction, neighborhood after neighborhood, a real savagery”, which has drawn a gray Gaza of dust and debris. “We are asking for SOS, to see if anyone hears the voices of those of us here. It seems they want to evict the entire population or make us feel afraid or do as much damage as possible so that Gaza has a serious reconstruction problem.”
He and 26-year-old Muhammad Imad may be separated by retirement, but both pharmacists say the same thing: “I’ve seen all the wars and I’ve never seen this, this is the biggest destruction. What we do here is wait for death”, admits Imad with fear.
Three days ago, a bomb destroyed his house in the Al-Karama area, near the border with Israel.
Imad is one of the more than 420,000 internally displaced persons counted by OCHA, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs, and now explains that he is at his grandfather’s house. “Family members sit in the same room because, if they bomb, we will all die together. If one remained alive, how could one continue with life?”. The interference imposes a harsh silence.
Sixteen years of blockade and, with it, seven wars, have shown that there is no safe place for the population in the strip. No one is safe in its barely 365 square kilometers. UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine Refugees, has semi-shelters in some clinics and other facilities, but “people don’t know where to go, there is no room in schools or hospitals.” These are “full to overflowing, even in the corridors”, according to Dr Al-Susi, and continue to run on generators fueled by scarce reserves of fuel oil, after Gaza’s only power plant was knocked out on Wednesday.
The Red Cross noted that the last supply could “be used up in a matter of hours, and without electricity hospitals could turn into corpse depots”.
During these days, those in Gaza have suffered power cuts and complete blackouts in some areas, with the telecommunications infrastructure completely damaged.
This is the case of Majid, who was without electricity for two days. In a space of one hour of light, he explains that they have batteries at home. “We try to charge the phone and listen to news”, the news in which, for Salah, in the United States and Europe “reduce the Palestinian-Israeli drama only to what happened to the Israelis, which is also unfortunate, very unfortunate.”
But the imminent collapse of the strip threatens to leave the Palestinians in the dark and disconnected from the world, who depend on messages from the Israeli army.
Chilling calls and texts, with which Israel is supposed to warn residents to leave an area before the bomb falls on them.
“We spend the night trying to calm the children because they are always crying, they are very scared because the bombings do not stop”, adds Majid, who experiences a feeling he has not experienced during the 2021 climb, and that is being a father and having his sister prop: “In the rest of the world, you lose friends when you get older. I am 35 years old and I have already lost more than ten friends and more than ten family members. I have always been afraid of losing my family, but there is no greater fear than losing your child or your nephews.’
For them, he risks going out to look for provisions, and on the way he notes the devastation and the scarcity of food. “Sometimes I can’t find anything for my son. We can go two or three days without food, but the children can’t. And we don’t know how long this war will last.”
Muhammad says it’s impossible to get south because the roads are completely washed away. “If there was a possibility, I would take my things right now and go there. I go anywhere safe, but there is no way. We have nothing to do, the only thing I want now is for my family and I to get out alive.”
