The war between Hamas and IsraelDossierFor the vice president of the NGO, doctor and researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations, the humanitarian situation in the enclave continues to deteriorate.
Do you have any news from your teams in Gaza?
On Sunday, October 29th, in the morning we had contact again with our teams, about twenty people. You are alive. They are still in extremely difficult conditions, just like civilians. One of the caregivers, who works in a hospital in northern Gaza, told us again how difficult it was for him to practice war medicine without treatment. He describes situations of amputations and surgical procedures without anesthesia. We are experiencing a flood of injured people, but also of classic patients for whom basic care is difficult. We are in a situation where mortality is high, all in pain because there are no or few painkillers.
What about the Israeli authorities’ new calls to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip?
We are under great pressure to evacuate two hospitals in Gaza City, Al-Shifa and Al-Quds. In this last facility there are 14,000 people present, sick, injured and many families who accompany them in the hope of obtaining a minimum level of protection from the strikes. The problem is that the bombing continues and that transporting the wounded and sick is extremely complicated without preparation and without logistical capacity for medical convoys. It is not realistic today or ten days ago to ask 500,000 people to go to the south of the Gaza Strip, where there is no help. The Red Crescent in Gaza received around ten trucks on Sunday, which is nothing compared to the scale of the need. The idea that tens of thousands of people, including the wounded and sick, could be evacuated from the north to the south is simply unrealistic.
Especially since the south of the enclave is not spared from the bombings.
The bombing in the south is less intense but continues. Some members of our team, as well as other Gazans who had gone to the south in the first few days, told us, given the situation, “If we die, we might as well die at home,” and they returned to the north. In fact, humanitarian aid is now present on a massive scale on the Egyptian side, which incidentally poses enormous management problems for the Egyptians. The humanitarian equipment is here and ready to return, but it is only coming in small quantities. So it is clear that the Israeli military authorities are asking thousands of people to go to a place where there is no help, where there are already thousands of people who are in need, without water, without food, basically is to exploit the concept of humanitarian aid for the purposes of massive population displacement. However, the use of humanitarian aid for military purposes is not permitted under international humanitarian law.
So the situation is dramatic?
Most of our teams are no longer operational, as is the case with most other NGOs. The United Nations has had around sixty of its members killed, and these people have nothing to do with terrorists. Dozens of local Red Crescent employees have also died and the situation continues to deteriorate. We are gradually moving from an open-air prison to an open-air mass grave. And we are always very concerned about the lives of our teams and of course the lives of civilians in general.