Julie Webb-Pullman, October 14th 2023
Palestinians search for survivors after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah
,southern Gaza Strip, on 13 October. Abed Rahim Khatib DPA
“Water? There is no water!” says a Gazan mother, scraping the last drops from the little she managed to store in anticipation of this disaster – a mother whose children were already suffering from gastrointestinal illnesses through the lack of potable water before this weeks’ events.
Households in Gaza City have had no access to fruit and vegetables for days - and still don't. Every single Gazan home is desperately struggling to find the fundamental necessities of life, waiting days for a water tanker to come, fruitlessly calling one after another and still they won't come, can’t come. The bombs are continuous - the choice is death by bombs or death from thirst and starvation.
“Food is low everywhere but especially in Gaza city and the northern areas. People are pulling together, many are only just surviving on tea and if they are lucky, traditional bread, zaatar and olives,” I was told.
What little water there is, will soon run out – and Israel is blocking any humanitarian aid that might be able to alleviate even a small part of the suffering in what is a most gross criminal act of collective punishment.
People trying to escape Gaza are being butchered. In a new low even for the Zionists, they instructed a million Gazans in the north to evacuate immediately to the south – then bombed them as they rushed to the roads leading out, killing at least 70 and injuring many more, in a most depraved and criminal attack on fleeing civilians.
And the West watches, cheering Israel from the sidelines, giving more weapons to keep the cogs of the colonial Israeli killing machine turning, the genocide grinding on.
There are now so many dead – 2,215 by yesterday, but with the Israeli killing rate of 14 per hour as reported by EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, we can expect that total to have already surpassed 2,500. Among them, 45 entire families that have been wiped off the civil records
Some half of the 9,000 injuries are of women and children – mostly children under 5 years old, according to one doctor.
Where can these injured seek help? Like water and food, there is almost none.
Hospitals and clinics have been bombed, others forced to evacuate – to where? There is nowhere to go, the borders are hermetically sealed.
How can critically injured people be transported, when 23 ambulances have already been wilfully and deliberately destroyed by a criminal apartheid regime determined to weaken rescue workers’ capabilities to respond in the field? Who can aid them in those ambulances that remain, when 10 of their paramedics have already been killed, and 27 more injured?
Who can tend them in what hospitals still survive?
They just don’t have the resources to treat the thousands of injured: no medicines, no medical supplies, and aid is not entering. What minimal fuel they have to generate electricity is running out. What then? Shifa Hospital in Gaza city is the biggest, but they could be ordered by the Israeli occupation to evacuate at any time. Its grounds are already filling with bodies overflowing from the morgue, which cannot contain them all. Where will the unidentified martyrs go?
What about the injured? The lack of supplies means they just have to go without, and do what they can as best they can.
And there is little they can do. The mobile phone shops have no power banks, no connections, no phones, no radios, even solar powered. Communications will soon cease.
While she still had access to the internet, a young woman in Gaza City described her current reality:
“You see in the street dozens of cars loaded with people, and on top of them dozens of items…and all of them are heading towards the Central and Southern provinces.
Did you know that there are dozens of families displaced by war, sleeping under any house that has an umbrella?
Did you know that every family that is not displaced, has at least another four displaced families with them in their apartment?
Did you know that the United Nations Relief & Work Agency schools are full, there is no room for anyone more?
It is very difficult for anyone outside the Gaza Strip to imagine, even if they are a chi of Gaza.
I swear to God, every moment every single person here imagines that their turn is coming, that they will be next.”
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not only criminal, it is also stoppable.
Every nation that has signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions is contractually - and morally - obliged to call on the Israeli occupation regime to IMMEDIATELY:
1. Cease its bombing of Gaza,
2. Enable the entry to Gaza of all necessary humanitarian assistance,
3. End the criminal siege of Gaza,
4. Release all Palestinian political detainees,
5. Withdraw from all occupied Palestinian territories.
No ifs, no buts. Just full compliance with international and humanitarian law.