2023-11-11 06:30:04
Scene of life in the playground of a school managed by UNRWA, transformed into a refuge for displaced Palestinians, in Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, October 25, 2023. MAHMUD HAMS / AFP
You have to queue everywhere. For the toilets, the distribution of drinking water, to be sure to eat a piece of bread during the day. Schools, clinics and centers of UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, host the majority of displaced people in Gaza today – more than 710,000 people out of a population of some 2 million. Daily life is blurred between promiscuity and renunciation, no one has taken a shower for a long time, there is only enough water to rinse from time to time. In a video published by the agency on November 3, a man in a shirt, with a growing beard and tired features, hands out empty cans in the middle of a crowded schoolyard in Deir Al-Balah, in the center of the Strip. Gaza: “There is no water, no food, nothing to drink, there is no more life! »
For more than a month, Gaza has been besieged and bombarded by the Israeli army, in retaliation for the bloody Hamas attack on October 7, which left 1,200 dead and 240 hostages. More than 10,800 residents of the enclave were killed, the majority women and children, according to the local Hamas-administered health ministry – “ several thousands » according to the Pentagon.
“The carnage must simply stop”wrote the Commissioner General of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, in an article published on November 8 in the Washington Postreiterating its calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. In the UN agency’s schools are those who lost their homes, those who fled to the south of the Gaza Strip after the army’s call on October 13 to evacuate the north, or those who hope to be a little safer there than at home.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers The Israeli army intensifies its strikes on Gaza, plunging civilians into terror and hunger
“The sanitary conditions are really very bad”
The classrooms, which lock, have been reserved for women and children, the courses open to men and adolescents. Each UNRWA-run institution hosts some 10,000 people and thousands more continue to flee the fighting which is now focused on Gaza City. The laundry that is aired on the railings only offers a glimpse of the clutter. There is “very little space per person. The sanitary conditions are really very bad,” deplores Tamara Alrifai, UNRWA communications director, from Jordan.
Palestinian refugees in a UN-run school, in Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, October 27, 2023. MOHAMMED SALEM / REUTERS People injured during Israeli strikes, in a school housing displaced Palestinians, in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, October 24, 2023. MOHAMMED ABED / AFP
Due to fuel shortages, water desalination points only operate for one to two hours a day. “As soon as the displaced hear the sound of the machines starting up to desalinate the water, the queues become enormous. Because of this lack of access to water, there is fear of moving from a situation where people die in bombings to a public health crisis where they risk dying due to lack of hygiene. » Already, diarrhea and stomach aches are common in schools. Added to this is a slow collapse of the public sector in the enclave at war: garbage is no longer collected and the sewers are overflowing.
You have 50% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
#saturated #shelters #Gaza #displaced #lack