First moments after Israel’s warning to residents of the northern Gaza Strip that they have 24 hours to leave their homes and go to the south of the enclave. Majid and his family, who are in Beit Lahia and are a five-minute drive from the border fence, are still undecided: “They want us to evacuate. I don’t know what we are going to do, but we don’t want to leave.”
Right now, every second that passes in the Gaza Strip is vital. The difference between one more bomb, one more body to unearth, the last light and WhatsApp connection, and now also, the decision to move. Eight hours pass between question and answer when a new message arrives from Dr. Salah Al-Sousi: “Let’s try to talk. We are miraculously alive.”
Local journalists, humanitarian organizations and more than two million Gazans – half of them children – are the eyes and voices on that side of the conflict that we cannot enter; a war that began with the multiple attack by Hamas on Saturday, and for which on Monday Israel, in retaliation, decided to cut off fuel, food and basic supplies from Gaza, where it maintains a total siege and incessant bombardment.
To this Israel has added a devastating element, and that is the possibility of a ground operation in the Strip. While the Islamist group asks Gazans to remain “firm”, the United Nations warns that it is “impossible” to evacuate 1.1 million people “without devastating humanitarian consequences”, which could “transform this tragedy into a calamitous situation”. And this, while the bombs continue to fall.
It is with missiles – aerial, sea-based and tank-based – that the testimonies begin their telephone stories. Al-Sousi, thanks to the drums of a friend, describes “a massive destruction, neighborhood by neighborhood, a real savagery,” which has drawn a gray Gaza of dust and rubble. “We asked for SOS, to see if anyone hears the voices of those of us who are here. It seems that they want to evict the entire population or cause fear or do as much damage as possible so that Gaza has a serious reconstruction problem.”
He and Mohammed Imad, 26, may be separated by retirement, but these pharmacists say the same thing: “I have seen all the wars and I have never seen this, this is the biggest one. What we are doing here is waiting for the death,” Imad acknowledges with fear.
Three days ago, a bomb turned his home in the Al-Karama area, near the border with Israel, into ruins. Imad is one of the more than 420,000 internally displaced people indicated by OCHA, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs, and now he explains that he is in his grandfather’s house. “We family members sit in the same room because, if they bomb, that’s how we all die. If one of us were left alive, how could he continue living?” The interference imposes a harsh silence.
16 years of blockade and, with this, seven wars, have shown that there is no safe place for the population in the Strip, “no one is safe” in its barely 360 square kilometers. UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestinian 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 “packed to the hallways,” according to Dr. Al-Sousi, and continue to run on generators powered by meager fuel reserves, after Gaza’s only power plant was taken out of service on Wednesday. The Red Cross points out that the last supply “could run out in a matter of hours, and without electricity hospitals could become morgues.”
During these days, Gazans have suffered power outages and complete blackouts in some areas, with damaged telecommunications infrastructure. This is the case of Majid, who suffered two days without power. During an hour of daylight, he explains that they have batteries at home, “we try to charge the phone and listen to the news to find out how this war is going.” This news that, for Salah, in the United States and Europe “is reducing the Palestinian-Israeli drama only to what happened to the Israelis, which is also regrettable, very regrettable.”
But the imminent collapse of the Strip threatens to leave Palestinians, who depend on messages from the Israeli Army, in the dark and disconnected from the world. Chilling calls and SMS, 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 always cry, they are very afraid because the bombings do not stop,” adds Majid, who today experiences a feeling not experienced in the 2021 escalation, and that is being a father and having his sister. close: “In the rest of the world, you lose friends when you get older. I am 35 years old and I have lost more than ten friends and more than ten relatives. I have always feared losing my family. But there is no greater fear than lose your son or your nephews.
For them he risks going out to get supplies, along the way he discovers devastation and food shortages. “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.”
Egypt says it has brought humanitarian aid to its airport in the Sinai and is pressing to enter it through Rafah, the crossing with Gaza that on the Palestinian side is closed due to bombing. It has also emerged that the United States is seeking a safe corridor for civilians to Egyptian soil, a proposal that neither seduces Cairo nor adjusts to reality on the ground.
Mohammed narrates that it is impossible to reach the pass in the south because the roads are washed out. “If there was a possibility, right now I would grab my things and go there. I would go to any safe place, but there is no way to the border. We have nothing to do, what I want now is for my family and I to get out of this alive.” war”.
