“You won’t find a single person among the 2.3 Palestinians living in Gaza who hasn’t suffered loss, injury or displacement due to complete or partial destruction of their home or forced evacuation because of the Israeli ultimatum threatening them with bombardment,” a UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) official told Al-Ahram Weekly while inspecting a refugee centre in Palestinian Rafah in southern Gaza.
“Living” in this case can only be understood metaphorically. The people the UN official is referring to in Gaza stand at the brink of a slow death, deprived of all basic needs. They have very little electricity if any, only scarce amounts of potable water, and very little food. Just to obtain bread, they have to stand for hours in long queues in front of the bakeries which are growing fewer by the day because of bombs or declining stocks of wheat and lack of fuel to power the generators.
The UNRWA official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media, added, “the number of people in Gaza who are in desperate need for help because of the war is huge. We’re only just beginning to see the magnitude of the catastrophe.”
The Israeli air raids have continued non-stop for three weeks running. The Gaza government’s media office (GMO) estimates that, as of the morning of 30 October, the Israeli occupation army dropped more than 18,000 tons of explosives on the Strip. This is one and a half times the magnitude of the atom bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima.
The GMO also reported that more than 200,000 housing units have been damaged and around 32,500 units have been completely destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. It noted that the figures are incomplete because of the intensity of the bombardment.
With the number of dead surpassing 8,000 in three weeks and the number of persons missing estimated at over 2,000, the Palestinians in Gaza do not have enough time to mourn or bury their dead. Rana Ziad (29) had lost nine members of her family when their house in Rafah in southern Gaza was bombed. She did not have the chance to pay her last respects, because by the time she had been discharged from hospital where she was being treated for her wounds, all her relatives had been interred.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has been forced to accelerate burial procedures for the people killed in the Israeli bombing because the corpses are accumulating too fast for the refrigerators in the hospitals’ mortuaries to accommodate them.
The Spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza Ashraf Al-Qudra, said that the ministry had decided to proceed with the burial of hundreds of unidentified bodies as no one had come to the hospital to identify them. Often, according to Al-Qudra, this was because all other family members had been killed in the Israeli raids or because the relatives were unable to reach the hospitals due to the heavy shelling.
Choking back her tears, Rana told the Weekly that it wasn’t until several days later that she was able to see the bodies of her late family members. This was on the video footage of their funeral on the phone of a relative who was taking care of her after she was discharged from hospital.
Before this unending nightmare, Rana had been looking forward to her wedding which she had been arranging with her fiancé who was outside Gaza. Now, she said, “I’m afraid of starting a family after losing mine in the blink of an eye.”
She is not alone in this. Abdul-Raouf Shaath, a photojournalist for an Arab news channel, told the Weekly that he and his wife of four years have not yet had children. He had been trying to persuade her to have the IVF procedure, but he has abandoned the idea after the horrors he has seen and documented with his camera.
“From what I’ve seen, there’s nothing like the agony of losing a family member or the sense of helplessness when you try to comfort a child trembling with fear due to the heavy bombardment,” he said. He added that he cannot help bursting into tears while filming the wounded arriving at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza or the bodies piling up in hospital courtyards. But, like dozens of other photojournalists, he has no choice but to continue to document Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
Several of Rana’s relatives were buried in one of the mass graves dug by bulldozers after the existing cemeteries in southern Gaza became too crowded. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to visit their grave yet,” she said. “I can’t get my head around the idea of standing in front of a pit containing the remains of my family members with no separate tombstones. I want to speak to the grave of each one of them individually.”
As the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Religious Endowments, which manages the cemeteries, struggle to keep pace with the rapidly accumulating bodies of victims, there remains the more urgent and even more difficult problem of the approximately 2,000 missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings. Civil defence teams have been battling against time to retrieve them. In addition to the dwindling hope of finding any of them alive, there is the fear that the decomposing bodies will contaminate the water and cause an outbreak of disease, especially as the rainy season approaches.
Meanwhile hospital and healthcare facilities in Gaza are verging on collapse. As though it were not enough that the occupation army bombs hospitals, healthcare staff are working under extremely gruelling conditions, with the facilities filled to double capacity, the risk of electricity cut-offs when the generators run out of fuel, the depletion of medical supplies, and insufficient blood transfusion units.
Israel is deliberately targeting the health sector, the spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in statement to the press on 29 October. Since 7 October, 116 health personnel have been killed, 25 ambulances have been damaged and put out of service, 57 health organisations have been targeted, and 12 hospitals and 32 primary healthcare clinics have shut down due damage from the Israeli bombardment or lack of fuel.
On Monday (30 October), Israel targeted the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the only cancer hospital in the Strip. The blast damaged the oxygen system and water supply, endangering the lives of patients and staff, its director, Sobhi Skeik said in a press release. He stressed that the hospital had not received an evacuation order before the strike.
The Israeli army spokesman has been issuing daily threats to the Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility. Israel claims that Hamas is using it as an operations’ base, a claim that preceded the bombing of Al-Awda and Al-Quds hospitals in Gaza City.
“Thousands of displaced people have sought refuge in the hospitals, which further strains the health system,” Al-Qudra said. “This also brings on the risk of a terrible health crisis among the patients, especially those with weakened immune systems.” Noting that public health teams have recorded thousands of dermatological infections, contagious illnesses such as influenza and chickenpox, and severe diarrhoea, he warned, “there is a high risk of rapidly spreading epidemics among the displaced population due to water scarcity and lack of personal and environmental hygiene.”
The health situation is so dire that the Ministry of Health issued an urgent appeal for volunteers among students and graduates of medicine and nursing schools, and retired doctors and nurses to fill the hospitals’ desperate need for medical staff. Even worse lies ahead as the occupation forces proceed with the ground incursion into Gaza. At that point, medical personnel will be unable to operate in areas into which the Israeli forces have advanced, which means that the fate of the wounded in those areas will be sealed.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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