Gaza’s human horror

Alaa Al-Mashharawi, Wednesday 13 Mar 2024

At the start of Ramadan, a bird’s eye view of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Gaza s human horror

 

As Ramadan begins, the five-month-old Israeli war on Gaza has entered another perilous stage: the predicted health disaster. Children are the most vulnerable.

Already many have died due to dehydration, severe malnutrition, and lack of medicines and health care.

The situation is especially dire in northern Gaza where living conditions are the worst, access to food and medical treatment is scarcer than elsewhere, and children are starving.

Meanwhile, the Israeli aggression is unrelenting. Israeli occupation forces (IOF) warplanes sustain their random bombardments of all parts of Gaza and casualties continue to multiply. At last count, the Israelis have killed over 31,000 civilians and wounded more than 73,000. The figures do not include the more than 10,000 missing and possibly buried beneath the ubiquitous rubble.

According to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 27 children have died within a week due to malnutrition and lack of treatment. The crisis has been aggravated by the unavailability of fuel to power the facilities at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

“We have been monitoring the cases of infant deaths due to severe dehydration and malnutrition in northern Gaza,” the Ministry of Health Spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra, said in a statement to Al-Ahram Weekly. He pointed out that 15 of these cases occurred in Kamal Adwan Hospital alone and warned that child deaths from drought and malnutrition will increase exponentially if the food, water, electricity, and medical situations are not remedied immediately.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), on its X (formerly Twitter) account, reports, “Hunger is everywhere in Gaza. The situation in the north is tragic, where aid via land is denied despite repeated calls…The death toll continues to rise.”

Earlier, the heads of around 20 UN humanitarian agencies and partner organisations issued a joint appeal for a ceasefire in Gaza. They called on Israel to fulfil its legal obligation, under international humanitarian and human rights law, to provide food and medical supplies, and facilitate aid operations and they called on world leaders “to prevent an even worse catastrophe from happening.”

The independent Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has recorded the death of dozens of children and elderly in hospitals in the Gaza Strip due to lack of water, food, and medicine. It too warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.

Describing the heartrending plight of children in northern Gaza, Salah Abdel-Aty, director of the Hashd Foundation for Human Rights, fears that many more will die from severe dehydration and hunger.

In a statement to the Weekly, he said he could not stress enough the urgency of bringing large quantities of humanitarian aid, food, water, medicine, and fuel into Gaza.

“This is a matter of life and death for the children,” he said. He added that urgent action was also needed to remedy the water scarcity and sewerage problems that are causing a public hygiene crisis.

“The healthcare system in Gaza has totally collapsed, from primary care to chronic diseases and to emergency treatment,” Bassel Al-Ailah, medical director of Doctors of the World, told the Weekly. “Civilians in Gaza are in peril. Military escalation against Rafah will claim untold numbers of casualties and deal a fatal blow to humanitarian efforts.

Before the war, 2,000 patients could be sent abroad for treatment. That was under normal conditions when there was an integrated health system and hospitals were able to work properly. How can medical personnel possibly deal with the situation now that most healthcare facilities have stopped functioning due to Israel’s actions? There must be an immediate ceasefire. Civilians must be protected so they can be treated in Gaza or abroad.”

“Inhuman,” UNRWA Spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said, summing up the crisis in Gaza in remarks to the Weekly. He stressed that humanitarian relief and medical aid must be allowed in sufficient quantities from all crossings, including those into northern Gaza. 

He also deplored the campaign to discredit and defund UNRWA, which “is the backbone of humanitarian operations in Gaza and must receive the required resources”. All the agency’s appeals to send in food relief to Gaza have “fallen on deaf ears,” he added.

He was further concerned that the IOF would act on its threat to invade Rafah and drive out its inhabitants – “But to where? Where are they supposed to go?” He feared yet another major bloodbath.

Describing the disastrous conditions for the more than 1.5 million displaced persons in Rafah, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) there spoke of the overcrowding everywhere, whether inside and outside shelters, the desperate crowds waiting for hours around aid distribution centres, the widespread hunger and thirst, the many ill but with no access to medical care, the cold and winter downpours that have compounded suffering, and washing away flimsy tents and makeshift shelters.

According to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, a vocal opponent of the occupation, the IOF plans to forcefully transfer the displaced in Rafah to Mawasi. Located on the coastal strip in southwestern Gaza, the district is 12 km long and 1 km wide, or about 3 per cent of the total area of Gaza.

“All we can do now is to request, beg, cry out: Don’t enter Rafah,” Levy wrote. “An Israeli incursion into Rafah will be an attack on the world’s biggest displaced persons camp. It will drag the Israeli military into committing war crimes of a severity that even it has not yet committed. It is impossible to invade Rafah now without committing war crimes. If the Israel Occupation Forces invade Rafah, the city will become a charnel house.”

He continues, “It is impossible to transport one million entirely destitute people, some of whom have been displaced two or three times already, from one “safe” place to another, that always turn into killing fields. It is impossible to transport millions of people as if they were calves meant for shipment.

Even calves cannot be transported with such cruelty. There is also nowhere to evacuate these millions of people. In the devastated Gaza Strip, there is nowhere left to go.

If the Rafah refugees are moved to Al-Mawasi, as the IOF will propose in its humanitarian plan, Al-Mawasi will become the site of a humanitarian disaster the likes of which we haven’t seen in the Strip.”

Levy’s colleague, the journalist Amira Haas is also appalled at the IDF’s proposal: “Even if ‘only’ about a million Palestinians will flee for the third and fourth time into Al-Mawasi – an area which is already full of displaced Gazans – the density will be about 62,500 people per square kilometre (about 157,000 people per square mile). 

This will happen in an open area with no skyscrapers to house the refugees, that has no running water, no privacy, no means of living, no hospitals or medical clinics, no solar panels to charge phones, and all while aid organisations will have to cross through or near battle zones in order to distribute the small amounts of food that do enter the Gaza Strip.” She wonders “how the IOF plans to reconcile this with the ICJ’s order that Israel must take all measures to avoid acts of genocide.”

As Ramadan began, Al-Ahram Weekly spoke with some of the displaced people in Rafah, against a grim backdrop of the tens of thousands of tents and rickety shelters made of sheet metal, metal poles and tree branches:

Samir Al-Bakri, 56: “Unfortunately, this is a very hard and painful time for us. Ramadan has come and we’re in these tents. We will miss the wonderful Ramadan atmosphere and the family gatherings in our home which the occupation forces destroyed. Our house is gone, but our memories remain. No one is paying attention to our pain and suffering. This is our fate. The world watches from afar, now that the war has become an entry in the news broadcasts they view on their mobile phones and televisions.”

Manar Al-Taramsi, 29, was displaced from the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza together with her husband and three children. She recounts: “We fled to Khan Younis and then to Rafah where we live in a tent. We’re holding on despite the lack of food, medicine, and water. But we’re terrified because of Netanyahu’s threats to attack Rafah.”

Fahd Al-Ghara, 48, displaced from Tel Al-Hawa near Gaza City and now living in Tel Al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah: “We expect to die. We’re afraid of the unknown. I don’t know where we will go from here. I fear the Rafah operation is approaching because the raids and shelling all around us have increased a lot.”

Umm Salah Radi, 63, said that she would not be able to bear the pain of being displaced a third time. After being forced to leave Gaza City she moved to Khan Younis and then from there she had to walk three days to Rafah, in the rain, having to sleep in the street, like the thousands of others fleeing the war. “I can’t bear it anymore,” she said, tears welling, her wrinkled face drawn and weary.

“Death may be more merciful than this torment. I don’t know where we will go, where we will sleep. Look at how wretched our lives have become. We’re living next to a pool of sewerage and the street is full of garbage.”

The situation is not much better in the schools that have been turned into shelters, according to Ghada Darwish, 27: “My three children and I lived in a classroom with more than 50 other people. The conditions became so unbearable that I decided to live in a tent despite the cold and rain.  My children are afflicted with scabies, lice, and respiratory ailments. Not a moment goes by when I don’t feel like screaming and crying.”

Mervat Al-Qayed, 38, and her family have had to move three times since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza. “We’ve been turned into beggars,” she said angrily, standing at the flap that serves as the door to a plastic tent. “My husband is sick because of the cold. We don’t have enough blankets. No one helps us. No one cares. We don’t want food or water. We just want to die.”

Abu Nayef Mahio, 59, displaced along with his family from northern Gaza: “We’re seven people sharing a single blanket,” he shouted. “It’s winter. Why don’t they give us mattresses, blankets, and clothes to protect us from this bitter cold? How long will we have to suffer before anyone answers our cries for help?”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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