2023-11-10 21:35:00
Bursts of gunfire, explosions and the incessant drone of drones: in Gaza City, the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian Hamas continues to increase in intensity as the columns of families fleeing to the south, driven by hunger, grow. and fear.
Here, everything is ruins. In the darkness of the night which falls at the end of the afternoon, a patch of light stands out: the immense complex of the al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, a small strip of land of 365 square kilometers where 2.4 million besieged inhabitants are crowded together, stuck between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean.
“The situation is very tough in Gaza City. There are bombings everywhere, there are a lot of fighting and Israeli incursions,” journalist Waël al-Dahdouh, face of the Qatari channel Al, told AFP. -Jazeera in Gaza.
She has just left the city, which hundreds of thousands of inhabitants have already left, complying with the orders of the Israeli army which is now deploying its tanks in the north of the Gaza Strip and, she says, even ‘in the “heart of Gaza City”. And at the gates of its hospitals, report caregivers and international organizations.
“Tragedy”
Previously, in the city which had 600,000 inhabitants before the war started on October 7 by a bloody Hamas attack, all the streets rustled constantly.
The corniche welcomed families on the go and joggers wishing to keep in shape. Restaurants and cafes flourished and the UN schools provided two or three shifts every day to accommodate all the children, causing traffic jams on the avenues where cars and horse-drawn carts jostled as they left each class.
Today, after five weeks of fighting of unprecedented violence in the territory – although shaken by four wars between 2008 and 2021 – almost half of the houses have been damaged and destroyed according to the United Nations, and the dead number in the thousands, sometimes stranded in UN schools or hospitals where they thought they would be safe.
Since October 7, the Hamas government’s Ministry of Health has recorded more than 11,000 deaths, more than two-thirds of them women and children, and more than 27,000 injured.
So today, there are thousands again taking the southern route on foot.
Jawad Harrouda finally agreed to leave Chati, the huge refugee camp on the north coast, when the bombings came closer on Thursday evening. A “tragedy”, he said. “Given the intensity of the bombings and shootings, I had no hope of getting out alive with my children,” he told AFP.
Mounir al-Raï, also comes from Chati, where his parents found refuge after the “Nakba”, the “catastrophe” that the creation of Israel represented for the Palestinians in 1948, pushing more than 760,000 of them to exile or displacement, according to the UN.
“Nothing at all anymore”
In Shati, he told AFP, the Israeli army struck “indiscriminately”.
“Houses are collapsing on their inhabitants, women and children are not spared and all that remains of them are human shreds,” he says, a small child on his shoulders.
Israel, which has counted around 1,200 dead since the start of the war, according to a new report from the authorities, has engaged in urban guerrilla warfare to “liquidate” Hamas, which it accuses of hiding in tunnels under civilian houses. and even in hospitals.
But beyond the whizzing bullets and never-ending air raids, it is the shortages that have pushed many people to leave.
“There is nothing left at all” in Gaza, says Mohammed al-Talbani, his baby in his arms and a bag with all his belongings on his back. “No more water and food. In the stores, we no longer find diapers or milk for children,” he says, before continuing on his way, among cohorts of exhausted families.
On Thursday, the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs announced that no bakeries were operating in the northern Gaza Strip. The largest of them in Gaza City was shut down on Tuesday when an Israeli bombardment took away the solar panels that supplied it with electricity.
Hungry residents then rushed to its stocks of flour, because, reports the UN, Gazans survive today by eating only raw onions.
10/11/2023 20:33:26 – Gaza Strip (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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