“I can not talk right now. I will write to you at the end of the day… If I haven’t died.” Hala Riziq tells in audio messages about her escape from one part of the Gaza Strip to another, the strip that Israel keeps completely surrounded and where it has been since Saturday’s massive militia attack , which claimed 1,200 lives and dropped hundreds of tons of bombs. The audio arrives when it arrives because there is no internet and the data connection often drops out. According to the Hamas government, the fuel shortage this Wednesday has shut down the only power plant and is endangering the water supply that feeds the underground water pumps. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Monday with no water, food, electricity or fuel supplies.
Riziq, 45, says she fled her home in the Gaza capital with her husband and four children on Sunday after a building 50 meters away was bombed. “I ran from one place to another. The street was full of people who didn’t know where to go. I had a panic attack because I looked at my children and didn’t know how to protect them,” he says, as the sound of the bombings can be heard in the background.
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He then went to one of the hotels with “security clearance”. Those whose coordinates are passed on to Israel because they usually host employees of international organizations, NGOs (your case) or journalists. Two hours later they told him it wasn’t safe and to find another place. “I couldn’t because it was night. I was waiting for dawn and the building in front of the hotel was bombed. I went to another one, where at 2 p.m. they shouted at us: “You have to leave immediately!” In my haste, I forgot the bag with identity papers and birth certificates that I always prepare in such cases,” he says.
Women with children in their arms or hands walk along a street in the Gaza Strip this Wednesday, fleeing Israeli bombings. MOHAMMED ABED (AFP)
Riziq explains that he then ran to his mother’s house, in a relatively safer part of the city. And that the dark streets were lit with torches before the bombings or the fires caused by the rockets that have claimed 1,100 lives since Saturday. Another 60 displaced people were found there, with no water or food for everyone. “My husband told me, ‘Let’s break up.’ So that when we die, we don’t all die at the same time and there is something left of the family,” he remembers.
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He has returned to his home despite the broken windows and debris from the nearby bombing because he has concluded that “there is not a single safe place in Gaza” and he can constantly hear the drones flying overhead from wherever he is in the hunters descend to fire the projectile. “This morning I sent messages to all my friends outside Gaza because I feel like I will die sooner or later. I wrote to them that I would write to them every day: “I am alive” and that if any of them do not do this, they should forgive me if I have done something bad to them, think of me and pray for it, that my family and I rest in peace.
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Gaza has not gone from paradise to hell since Saturday. The power outage, for example, barely worked a few hours a day before the attacks on Israel. The rest depends on generators, which today enable the institutions, companies and families who can afford them to operate them. Going out to Egypt or Israel has been a luxury for the last decade and a half. The rest of the 2.2 million inhabitants live in close quarters (about 5,500 people per square kilometer, 60 times more than in Spain), with 22% drinking water, 47% unemployed and 62% of the population dependent on humanitarian aid. The last four major Israeli offensives killed 4,000 people.
Israel captured Gaza in the Six-Day War in 1967 and unilaterally evacuated it of settlers and soldiers in 2005. A year later, the Palestinians held elections. Hamas won, but the international community boycotted the new government because it failed to meet demands for de facto recognition of Israel and a renunciation of violence. He is the mastermind of Saturday’s attack and is classified as a terrorist by the EU and the USA. He has controlled the Gaza Strip alone since 2007 after clashes with the rival Al-Fatah faction. And since then, Israel has subjected Gaza to a siege, even calculating minimum calories per capita in its harshest years to avoid famine.
Residents of a Gaza Strip neighborhood survey the damage caused by Israel’s overnight bombings. Majdi Fathi (NurPhoto/Getty Images)
For Fatma Yamal Muhaisen, the problem is now different: “Due to connection problems and lack of internet, it is even difficult to know whether family and friends are still alive.” I’m not talking about asking them if they are okay, because in these circumstances it doesn’t make anyone feel good, it’s just a matter of asking them if they are alive. Sometimes we just listen to the bombs and hope that they are them. I also have family outside of Gaza and they often cannot establish contact with us. It makes her heart beat faster every time it takes a while for the answer to arrive. And for me, a different one for every bomb, no matter how far away it sounds,” he says, also via WhatsApp audio message.
Muhaisen, 20 years old, assures that it is the worst offensive he has ever experienced (there have been seven since 2008) and illustrates the mood with what happened to him the night before: “At midnight there was a loud knock the door and said we were running. When I opened it, I suddenly saw hundreds of people fleeing without knowing where. Nobody would know anything if there had been a warning [misiles con poca carga explosiva para avisar del verdadero bombardeo] or a call to vacate. “It turned out to be a false alarm.”
There are now 20 at home because they are taking in other displaced people and rationing drinking water. They have a tank for toilet and kitchen water. Plus external batteries and an electric generator that “will need fuel at some point.” “There are only a few things left in the supermarkets because people have already taken everything. The bakeries are open. We keep the bread in the freezer. It doesn’t work, but at least we tried,” he says.
“Netanyahu says we are going to another part of the Gaza Strip, but where?” protests Muhaisen, referring to the Israeli prime minister’s appeal to Gazans on Saturday. He warned them to leave “immediately” if they live near a place where Hamas is “based, hiding or operating” because it would ultimately be “reduced to rubble.” A military spokesman then asked everyone to flee to Egypt via a closed border crossing.
A man carries in his arms a girl who was injured in an Israeli bombing in Khan Younis, south of Gaza. IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA (Portal)
The UN World Food Program warned this Wednesday of “very soon depletion of food stocks and basic needs”. According to the United Nations, more than 180,000 people have lost their homes in the Gaza Strip. They wander the streets because they consider it less dangerous than staying indoors, or they stay mainly in schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). According to the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, 20,000 houses and ten medical centers have been affected by the destruction. In addition, 48 schools were damaged.
One of those buildings is the Palestinian Center for Cultural Dialogue and Development, whose headquarters have been in ruins since Tuesday, says its director Wajeeh Abu Zarife. “There are bombings from all sides. At the moment, none of us in Gaza feel like we are in a safe place. Not at home, not on the streets, not in hospitals, not even in UNRWA schools. “People are running from one place to another.” But what worries Abu Zarife is not these days, but what is coming: “We neither know what it is nor see any efforts to stop it.”
It is the “strong revenge” – in Netanyahu’s words – in which the Israeli armed forces have already dropped “hundreds of tons of bombs”, according to their spokesman Daniel Hagari, with “the emphasis on damage and not precision”. Since Saturday, Israeli politicians and military officials have emphasized the focus and scale of the offensive, which will likely include a ground invasion. “In war you have to be brutal,” said far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as he defended “a coup that hasn’t happened in 50 years.” [la Guerra del Yom Kippur] to end Gaza” and with “brutal bombings that do not significantly address the issue of prisoners,” in reference to the at least 130 Israelis in the Gaza Strip who were kidnapped during the attack. “We will transform the Middle East,” Netanyahu summarized.
If for the young Muhaisen this is her worst war, for the Spaniard Raúl Incertis it is the first of this caliber. He is an anesthesiologist and arrived in the Gaza Strip just eleven days ago as part of an orthopedic and reconstructive surgery mission for the NGO Doctors Without Borders. He is housed with dozens of other humanitarian workers and international organizations in a basement of a UN building, which seems like a “paradise on earth” compared to his first two days in a building with no basement, which in reality is more like that of the locals . There, he and his eight colleagues from the NGO spent Monday night “squatting on the floor” on the ground floor, hearing projectiles every few minutes. “They bombed a mosque about 150 meters away. The windows of the house were broken. But the worst experience of my life was hearing the children in the house next door start to cry in fear,” he says.
As teenager Shahd Raed Al Wahidi apologizes for being almost offline for three days, she feels the need to add a reassuring phrase: “We are alive.”
A man carries mattresses through a destroyed street in Jabalia, Gaza on Wednesday. MAHMUD HAMS (AFP)
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