Some are baking bread, others are hanging out laundry to dry: In Gaza’s hospitals, the displaced people who are seeking refuge from the bombs are now joined by the ambulances arriving with loud bangs, the ballet of stretcher bearers and the doctors operating on an assembly line basis .
• Also read: LIVE | 11th day of the Israel-Hamas war
• Also read: IN PICTURES | Israeli attacks on the southern Gaza Strip: horror scenes with dead and injured civilians
Amira, 44, settled with her children in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younès, in the south of the small Palestinian territory where hundreds of thousands of people in the Gaza Strip have moved since the Israeli army asked people to leave areas to the north .
“Our whole body itches, it’s been a week since we last showered, death would be more merciful to us,” she told AFP, making sandwiches with the few pancakes she had. She was able to relax for her children.
Since October 7th and the bloody attack by Hamas, whose commandos in Israel killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took 199 hostages, the number of victims in the bombarded Gaza Strip has continued to rise. Without delay from the Israeli army.
According to Hamas authorities, there are already around 3,000 dead, including hundreds of children, and more than 10,000 injured. And the carers in this small, poor and overpopulated area are worried about all the chronically ill people whose lives are now in danger due to the lack of medicine, electricity and water.
“It’s horror”
But so far the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, the only access to the world from Gaza that is not in Israeli hands, remains closed.
It was bombed for the fourth time on Monday night, and Israelis, Egyptians and Americans cannot agree on a mechanism to bring in aid, let foreigners out of Gaza and provide the security guarantees demanded by Egyptians and Israelis.
“It’s terrible,” describes Abu Assaad al-Qudsi, who remained in Gaza City despite the evacuation call and sought refuge in the Al-Chifa hospital, the largest in the Palestinian territory.
“It’s whole families with their children, sometimes small children, old people,” this elderly man told AFP.
Everyone hopes to avoid airstrikes on hospitals, although the World Health Organization (WHO) has already recorded that “111 medical infrastructures were attacked, 12 nurses were killed and 60 ambulances were attacked,” its regional chief Ahmed al-Mandhari told AFP on Monday.
Ibrahim Teyssir was also admitted to al-Chifa hospital because, as he told AFP, “no one feels sorry for us.”
“What did we do to deserve this? What did the children do? “What have the women done?” he loses his temper.
“Danger of death or epidemics”
“Most ordinary people don’t belong to any armed group,” he continues to plead, even as Israel says it is bombing Gaza – home to 2.4 million people, half of them children – to “liquidate” Hamas.
In Khan Younes, the Nasser Hospital has become a large makeshift camp: In its courtyard, hundreds of families have set up makeshift mattresses on which they try to sleep every night, bitterly despite the noise of the air raids and the increasing cold.
The residents of the Gaza Strip, 60% of whom relied on food aid to survive before the war, have also been living without electricity for “six days,” the UN reports.
And if Israel claims to have partially restored water supplies, the tap opened in eastern Khan Younes only supplies Gazans with “less than 4% of their pre-war consumption.”
According to Unicef, residents of the Gaza Strip, which is under a state of siege after 16 years of Israeli blockade, “are in imminent danger of death or epidemics if water and fuel do not immediately return to the Gaza Strip.”
In certain refugee camps, even Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), assures us that “hundreds of people have to share a single toilet”.