2023-11-15 00:51:24
by Lorenzo Cremonesi
The voices from the Strip: children and sick people are paying the price
JERUSALEM — FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
« Since the beginning of the Israeli ground attack, we civilians in Gaza have no longer seen the Hamas guerrillas. They are hidden, they fight and then they disappear. You no longer meet one in the streets, not even at night. And this is one of the reasons why the Israeli statements according to which Hamas is still trying to block the flight of people from north to south make me smile. Initially they advised not to do it, but it was just a suggestion that I, among other things, agree with: Hamas has no checkpoints, it doesn’t impose controls, it simply isn’t there. I know this because I work in the area. And this absence has seen a certain discontent grow in recent times. Many of my friends are starting to ask if it was really worth it. It is true that the attack on 7 October brought the Palestinian question back to the center of politics in the Middle East, but now it is ordinary people, children and the sick in hospitals who are paying the price for Israeli military revenge.”
Yesterday we managed to get back in touch with Fadi Abu Shammala, director of the cultural centers in Gaza, an old acquaintance with whom we had already spoken a couple of weeks ago. Immediately after the start of the war, he and his wife and three children left their apartment in the northern neighborhoods of Gaza City to move to their father’s in Khan Younis, in the center of the Strip. Yesterday he was in Rafah and was trying to reach Egypt, his cell phone started working again.
Without food
This is what he told us about the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where his brother works. «All hospitals are on black alert. Over 20,000 displaced people have taken refuge in Nasser, in addition to patients who are at risk of epidemics and infections, skin diseases are increasing due to the lack of hygiene. There is still electricity, it is not in total collapse like Shifa in central Gaza. But there has been no food for at least 10 days. We can’t even find cans, we depend on the few vegetables that farmers can collect. But the biggest problem remains overcrowding. About 450,000 people lived in Khan Younis and the surrounding refugee camps, now over 900,000 have been added. Too many, no one knows what to do. Those who can stay with friends and relatives, but the vast majority simply camp on the streets. Improvised toilets are dug, simple holes in the earth. But no one washes, there is rubbish everywhere, the smell is unbearable, there are huge black insects that I have never seen. Doctors continue to talk about the risk of cholera, which now becomes higher with the first rains.”
Fadi talks at length about the economics of survival. Costs have tripled, there is a black market in water. At first it seemed that people might go and wash in the sea. But he flatly denies it: “The Israelis carry out constant raids on the beaches, they are deserted, and it’s a shame because they could offer some form of temporary refuge.” One of the most dangerous points is the Netzarim passage, along the small depression of Wadi Azza, which divides the Strip in two and where the Israelis push the masses fleeing towards the south. «The soldiers are about a hundred meters from the place where they placed their cameras, they want to filter out the displaced people to keep the guerrilla isolated in the northern part. Every now and then they shout with the megaphone for someone to stop and go away from their patrols with their hands in the air. As if it were a mass selection: almost all those arrested never return. We already have thousands of disappeared people”, he explains.
The price of water
The water shortage remains very serious. There is no energy to boil the dirty one and the black market is growing even for the unfiltered one. Today you pay 60 shekels (14.50 euros, ed.) for 1,000 liters, previously you paid 40 for 5,000. Yesterday’s poor are today’s rich and vice versa. «Whoever had a new Mercedes won’t do anything with it, there’s no petrol. Farmers with a donkey and a cart, on the other hand, do a roaring trade, they have become the new popular taxis, in great demand”, he says. As for the delicate question of Hamas’s level of popularity, he repeats more forcefully what only a few days ago seemed like a limited phenomenon: «As the victims increase and the suffering continues, people begin to protest. A few days ago I saw a nurse at the Shifah hospital openly accuse Hamas of not having taken into account the consequences of his raid on 7 October. I saw that two bearded men then followed him, I don’t know what happened. I saw an old man on Salahaddin street shouting: “Tell Ismail Haniyeh who is in his golden exile in Qatar and other Hamas leaders that I am Abu Hamza from the Shati refugee camp and I accuse them of being collaborators of the Israelis!”. Just a few days ago something like this would have been unthinkable. But these discontents generally remain secret.”
November 14, 2023 (changed November 14, 2023 | 10:20 pm)
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