Rahma Saqallah fled with her husband and four children from Gaza City, which was bombed by the Israeli army, to the south. She returned there on Thursday with only her daughter; the others had died in a strike against a house where they thought they were safe.
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“Wherever we go, we will die,” said Ms. Saqallah, 40, as she prepared to leave the Khan Younes region in the south to return to Gaza City.
According to the United Nations, she is one of around 600,000 Palestinians who left northern Gaza for the south starting October 13, after the Israeli army ordered civilians to leave “for their own safety” in leaflets dropped from the sky .
The Israeli bombings, launched on October 7 in retaliation for a bloody Hamas attack in Israel, focused on Gaza City in the early days, although no area appeared spared.
But according to the United Nations, around 30,000 displaced people have returned to the territory’s north in recent days “due to ongoing bombing in the south and difficulties in finding adequate shelter.”
“My husband Fadel Saqallah and my three sons Daoud, Mohammad and Majed were martyred at dawn on Tuesday,” said Rahma Saqallah, who met her on Wednesday before her departure from Khan Younès and who confirmed her return to Gaza by telephone on Thursday. City.
“Die in our homes”
Her husband was 47, her son Majed was nine and Daoud was 18, while in her opinion Mohammad “should have celebrated his 15th birthday” on Wednesday.
The strike “destroyed the second and third floors” of a building where several families, about sixty people in all, had sought refuge.
According to her, eleven members of the Saqallah family were killed in the bombing, including her husband and three children, “as well as 26 people from other families.”
“Of my family, only me and my daughter Raghad (17 years old) are left. We are alive, but I can’t say we are well,” she confessed. “They have reduced Gaza to rubble and want to turn it into a cemetery.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin: “Netanyahu is a liar. They asked us to go south and killed us,” she added.
According to the Palestinian Islamist movement, more than 7,000 people have died in the Gaza Strip, including many children.
After seeking refuge in a hospital in Deir el-Balah, further south, Abdallah Ayyad, his wife and their five daughters piled into the trailer of a tricycle and headed north to return to Gaza City.
“We return to die in our homes. It will be more dignified,” the father said in a tone that mixed disgust and resignation.
“We live in degrading conditions here. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no toilets and to top it off there are bombings everywhere,” he lamented.
“No place is safe”
Some left the south but were unable to reach their homes in the north due to heavy bombardment and sought refuge in Gaza City’s main hospital, al-Chifa.
Entire families huddle under canvas tarpaulins hung on the walls and as tents on concrete pillars.
“Me, my wife, my children and my brothers-in-law, about 40 people in total, live in a tent that is less than three square meters in size. It is unworthy even for livestock,” said one of the displaced, Mohammad Abou al-Nahel.
“It is difficult to use the toilets due to overcrowding. We constantly see the arrival of martyrs and the wounded. We have no clean water to drink and the children are sick because of the cold,” said Mennah al-Bahtiti, another displaced person who left the south to seek refuge in hospital.
The UN’s humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian territories, Lynn Hastings, warned on Thursday that “no place in the Gaza Strip is safe” due to Israeli bombings.
When asked by AFP about its attacks in the south after ordering civilians in the north to go there for their own safety, the Israeli army did not immediately respond.
According to authorities, the war between Israel and Hamas left more than 1,400 dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, on the day of the attack on October 7.