Three months of relentless war have left the Gaza Strip virtually uninhabitable. The constant bombings and widespread destruction are just the tip of the iceberg in the tragic reality of 2.2 million Palestinians: While the dead pile up in the thousands, the living, almost all of them displaced, suffer from cold, epidemics and unbearable hunger.
The Israeli army's colossal offensive by air, land and sea against the Islamist group Hamas has left much of the enclave in ruins and two million Gazans have been forced to move south.r, although the fighting punishes this area too.
A million displaced people live in the city of Rafah on the border with Egypt. Entire families – including children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled – have settled in improvised tents in the middle of winter to escape the floods caused by rain, overcrowding, power failures, but above all hunger and thirst.
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“The situation on the streets has worsened and is becoming more difficult: a bag of potatoes worth one shekel now costs ten. Everything is expensive,” Ahmed Karam tells EFE as he strolls through a market.
“Everything is very unfair,” complains this man, who wears a thick coat and can neither afford a soda, a box of spaghetti, nor a bag of potatoes.
The situation on the streets has worsened and is becoming more difficult: a bag of potatoes worth one shekel now costs ten. everything is expensive
A few meters away, hundreds of people stand in long lines, pushing and shouting to get a bag of bread. Women and children form on one side, men on the other, but almost none of them are lucky. Whoever manages to get something hides it under his clothes, in his lap, so that no one can take it away from him.
At ground level, some sell cans of food, others push their carts full of tomatoes, pomegranates and peppers between the destroyed buildings, but almost no one buys.
Uninhabitable
The people of Gaza “are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. “Famine is just around the corner,” said Martin Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.
“The last 12 weeks have been particularly traumatic for the children: no food, no water, no school. Just the terrible sounds of war, day after day,” he added.
“Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people face daily threats to their existence while the world watches,” he lamented in a report.
The war broke out on October 7 after an attack by the Islamist group Hamas against Israel in which 1,200 people, including 36 children, were killed and 250 were kidnapped.
Since then, the Israeli army has detonated 65,000 tons of explosives over the Gaza Strip, killing nearly 23,000 people, including 10,000 children and 7,000 women, and wounding more than 58,000, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza government.
These numbers could be much higher considering that around 8,000 people are missing under the rubble.
Attacking Israel “was not a good decision because our situation would not allow war. If it were a better situation, if we were a country like Egypt, we would say yes,” a Gazan told EFE on condition of anonymity. She laments the economic and humanitarian crisis she is currently experiencing.
“The war did us no good, we have only lived in wars since we were born. How long? When will we live? We can’t take it anymore,” he adds, not ruling out an exodus from Egypt.
However, Gaza residents are banned from leaving the enclave, even if they have a visa to enter another country. Departures are approved on a selective basis following an official evacuation request from the foreign ministry of the third country through diplomatic channels and embassies in coordination with the Israeli authorities.
The tragedy comes amid the collapse of the health system in the enclave: 30 hospitals and 53 health centers in the Gaza Strip were out of service, 121 ambulances were destroyed and 326 members of the medical staff were killed.
The few clinics that continue to operate are operating at minimal levels: bed occupancy is at 350%, they lack 60% of basic medical care, and many of the patients are treated on the floor without anesthesia.in the middle of waiting rooms full of thousands of displaced people.
“Working conditions are catastrophic, with water and food supplies disrupted and security lacking,” said Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Medhat Abbas.
About 400,000 people fell ill with infectious diseases and of the 6,000 injured who had to be treated abroad, only 650 were able to leave the enclave, while many premature babies and cancer patients were in mortal danger.
“The humanitarian community is left with the impossible task of supporting more than 2 million people, even as their own personnel are killed and displaced, telecommunications outages continue, roads are damaged and convoys are shot at,” Griffiths lamented.
“Coming generations will never forget these 90 days of hell and attacks on the most fundamental tenets of humanity,” he warned, calling for an immediate ceasefire.
EFE