2023-11-20 17:00:43
A collapsed building in Gaza City, after a bombing, October 8, 2023. FATIMA SHBAIR / AP
Gaza is a broken city. A blind giant seems to have trampled entire sections of this metropolis of 1.2 million inhabitants. Since the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7 in the south of Israel, the indiscriminate bombings of the Israeli army have largely ruined it. The army is looking for an enemy hiding among civilians, but it is also punishing an entire city, judged, from the first days, guilty of Hamas’ crimes by the Israeli authorities.
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Of the distant northern suburbs of Gaza City, all that remains are charred carcasses, leveled by the strikes which prepared the ground invasion of October 28. In three weeks, armored vehicles and infantry took control of the western half of the main city of the enclave, advancing slowly under tight air support, which pierced numerous craters along the boulevards of Rimal and the surrounding area. hospitals. Fighting took place again on Sunday, November 19, in downtown Gaza. The Israeli army said on Monday that it would continue “to expand its operations into new neighborhoods”particularly in Jabaliya.
Since Friday November 17, the infantry has been advancing towards the narrow streets of the old town, the center and the eastern half of Gaza. What will be left in a few weeks, when Israel will proclaim that Hamas has been driven out? As of Sunday, 25% of the inhabited areas of the city and its northern region had already been destroyed, estimates the Palestinian Authority’s public works ministry.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that at least 58% of homes throughout the enclave are destroyed or damaged. The study of satellite photographs, using software developed by the Bellingcat site, makes it possible to estimate, with caution, that 40% to 50% of the buildings in Gaza City had been destroyed or damaged by the 16 November – and up to 70% of the Al-Chati refugee camp on the seafront.
Wandering the four corners of the city
The authorities in Ramallah draw up endless lists: they count 280 educational institutions and more than 200 places of worship damaged. All hospitals in Gaza are at a standstill, except one. The water and electricity distribution networks are unusable. A quarter of the roads in the enclave suffered damage.
“Gaza is already destroyed. It is nothing more than a ghost town, populated by a few hundred thousand displaced people. [800 000, selon l’Autorité palestinienne]. The Israelis wanted to punish one of the oldest cities in the world, by hitting its universities, its bookstores, its large hotels, its parliament and its ministries, deplores Ehab Bsaiso, former minister of culture of the Palestinian Authority. On November 13, a huge music teacher, Elham Farah, was injured in the street by a piece of shrapnel. She bled to death on the sidewalk and died. It’s a whole social mosaic, a culture that they are erasing, and soon the tanks will advance towards the Archaeological Museum and the old Orthodox church of Saint-Porphyry, an annex of which was bombed on October 19. » Coming from an old Gazan family, this senior official follows by telephone, from Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, the wandering of his relatives to the four corners of their hometown and the enclave under blockade, with a heavy heart.
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