“Let’s go? Where? On the street? It’s too dangerous to go out. And it’s just as dangerous to stay at home.” Farah Abu Abed responds to this newspaper’s call with an exhausted voice, after several in the background of this choppy conversation Days of continuous bombings in the Gaza Strip are heard. She is angry about the Israeli ultimatum that calls on the population of the northern strip, where she and her family live, to move south within 24 hours. For this 30-year-old woman would leave everything behind and flee would mean traveling more than 20 kilometers, probably on foot because there are no vehicles for everyone, on bombed roads, without the certainty that they will not be attacked and without the caution of children and the elderly with reduced mobility .In Abu Abed’s mind and in those of thousands of Gazans this Friday, one word repeated itself: “Nakba,” catastrophe in Arabic, a term that refers to the forced relocation of 750,000 Palestinians with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 relates.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Kholoud Sayed repeated this Friday morning from her apartment in Gaza City, where she locked herself on Saturday with her husband and three children after the bloody Hamas attack that caused the death of 1,300 Israelis. “They want to keep our country again, like in 1948. And the world watches and does nothing, it doesn’t stop them. I can’t express my feelings, I’m desperate and I haven’t slept a wink in a week. “I want to sleep and stop thinking.” Hours later, a laconic WhatsApp message announces: “Finally we are at a friend’s house in the south, we have decided to run away and wait.”
Nobody goes anywhere. The medical staff is committed to the sick until the end and beyond that we have nowhere to go
Medhat Abbas, Palestinian doctor
Israel has given 1.1 million people in the Gaza Strip 24 hours to leave their homes and shelters and head to the southern part of the Gaza Strip towards Egypt if they want to save their lives. This means the displacement of half the population of this small enclave of 365 square kilometers. In the northern part of the strip is the largest hospital in Gaza, Al Shifa, which is overwhelmed by the large number of wounded, already close to 7,000, and has had to move the bodies to the parking lot because there was no more space in it either Mortuary. “Nobody goes anywhere. The medical staff is fully committed to the sick and besides, we have nowhere to go,” Medhat Abbas, director general of the Ministry of Health in Gaza and a former doctor at this health center, told this newspaper.
The situation you describe is difficult to imagine: an overcrowded hospital where patients are housed on operating room and emergency room floors, doctors are overwhelmed by lack of medicine, supplies and clean water, and generators are on the verge of failure. Collapse occurs, which could lead to the death of some affected patients. For example, dialysis patients and babies in incubators. “We need them to open the border now. Let doctors and fuel come in, let particularly serious patients go. We can’t hold out much longer. We have experienced many terrible things, but nothing like this,” Abbas pleads.
“death sentence”
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The World Health Organization (WHO) sees the Israeli demand as “a death sentence” for many patients. In a statement, the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which operates in Gaza, condemned the Israeli ultimatum to the residents of the northern strip. “It represents an attack on medical care and violates every principle of humanity.” We are talking about more than a million people. The violence we are witnessing is unprecedented. Gaza is devastated and thousands of people die. “This must end now,” demanded the NGO.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world (about 5,500 people per square kilometer, more than 60 times the average in Spain) and half of the population is under 18 years old. Their lives are shaped by the conflict and the Israeli blockade that was imposed when Hamas came to power in 2007. Most of them have never set foot outside this small enclave where there is a lack of air and opportunities to work and where the chances of building a decent future or having some free time are almost nil. The UN defines the blockade as “collective punishment” and its Secretary-General António Guterres has said these restrictions violate international humanitarian law.
“It is another Nakba. It is inhumane, there are no words,” Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), confirmed by telephone. 70% of Gaza’s residents are refugees or descendants of those people who were forced to leave their homeland 75 years ago. “I’m not going anywhere,” adds this lawyer, whose family has lived in Gaza for generations, in a tired voice.
Palestinians interviewed by this newspaper on Friday said that the southward movement was not currently massive and that “hundreds of people” had taken the southward route. “The fear in Gaza, where 70% of the population are refugees, is that this is the first step towards expelling the population to Egypt. “Many fear further permanent displacement,” British NGO Medical Aid for Palestine, which provides health assistance in the occupied territories, said in a statement.
Georgette Mohammed, along with 150 other people, has been sheltering in her uncle’s house all week. They are crammed into four small apartments and conditions are getting worse every day. The message also reaches you in sections. “Hamas-affiliated media say this news [la advertencia de evacuación por parte de Israel como antesala de una posible invasión terrestre] Is it wrong. This is true? It’s happening right now? “I don’t know what to believe, but we’re staying here now,” she said, shocked, in a phone call to this newspaper.
Communication with Gaza is deteriorating by the hour. There has been no electricity in the Gaza Strip since Wednesday after Israel cut power and the local power plant stopped operating due to a lack of fuel. Additionally, internet connections are very unstable because the local telecommunications company was bombed. The enclave’s residents are increasingly misinformed and isolated, both among their own families and friends and among their contacts outside Gaza. Trying to reach someone by phone can take hours.
These Israeli announcements are the pretext for new massacres. Then they will argue, “We told them to leave.”
Ahmed Hamdan, Palestinian-Spanish
“I have seen atrocities all week and am very afraid for my family. I am thinking about moving them to the south because I have already lost several relatives this week,” explains Mohammed Abed, a news agency photographer. “I work like an animal, I don’t feel anything, I don’t think… I’m like a robot. At the moment there is no safe place in Gaza: if you stay at home they will kill you; If you go out on the streets, they’ll kill you too. So I better keep working and at least try to say what’s happening,” he says.
International law stipulates that civilians who cannot or do not want to flee remain civilians and cannot be attacked. And that the attacking forces must take all possible precautions to avoid loss of life, including repelling an attack.
For the Hamdan family, the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem is the last hope. The parents, both university professors, and their seven children are Spanish and have been waiting for days for news about a possible evacuation, as was organized during the Israeli offensive in 2014. Ahmed, one of the family’s children, has been living in Valencia for several years and feels out of breath when he doesn’t hear from his parents for hours.
“Our house in Beit Hanun, northern Gaza, was bombed on Monday and since then they have changed shelters twice. I can barely talk to them and the bombings don’t stop. How are they supposed to take to the streets like that? And where would they go?” he asks. “These Israeli announcements are the pretext for new massacres. Then they will argue, “We told them to leave.”
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