‘They told us it was safer here, but the bombardments are everywhere. Yesterday they blew up a nearby building. The nights are very difficult’
Haaretz
It has been a week since the friends of Maryam, a resident of Gaza City, heard anything from her. ‘I don’t believe I am still alive,’ she had written to them in a WhatsApp group. ‘I don’t know if I will survive in the coming hours. I am very tired. I wander from place to place – from my home to the hospital – and there are bombings all the time.’ After that post, Maryam stopped answering her friends. This Sunday morning, October 22, someone else updated: ‘Maryam has died.’
About 100 women from all around the Gaza Strip are members of the group established after Operation Guardian of the Walls in June 2021. They update one another on their situation and help families in need. In recent months, the group was quiet, nearly inactive – until October 7. Recently, the frequency of reports there on the dead, the missing under the ruins and the families that have left their homes never stop.
‘I wrote to [my sister] several times, she didn’t answer. I knew something had happened. I don’t know if they buried her. I don’t know what has happened to her children.’
Maryam’s story exemplifies what has faced the inhabitants of the northern Gaza Strip in recent days. Two things are engaging Gazans these days: surviving for another day and paying their relatives their final respects and giving them a decent burial. And if not a decent burial, then at least writing a eulogy and posting it on the social networks.
On October 20, journalist Assil Moussa from the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip eulogized a colleague, Mahmoud Na’azouq, who was killed with his family in an Israeli bombardment of Dir-al-Balah. ‘Mahmoud was intelligent and ambitious, she worte on X. ‘He was chosen for an Australian scholarship to study for a master’s degree in international relations. He was about to leave in the coming months to begin his studies.’
A Gazan woman named Nidaa tells Haaretz: ‘I don’t know how to describe the situation now.’ She and her family left their home in Gaza City, and she is now living with them in Rafah. ‘They told us it was safer here, but the bombardments are everywhere. Yesterday they blew up a nearby building. The nights are very difficult.’
Nidaa relates that she lost her sister and her family members the previous Friday in Dir al-Balah. ‘I wrote to her several times, she didn’t answer. I knew something had happened. I don’t know if they buried her. I don’t know what has happened to her children.’
Rania, a mother of two and seven months pregnant: ‘The mothers and their children are always the first to be harmed.’
She says it is harder and harder to identify the dead, and especially the children who have been killed with their parents in airstrikes. ‘Some of them are buried in a mass grave, without names,’ she says and stresses that she has decided to write her children’s names on their bodies. ‘I wrote their names on their hip and their thigh. If anything happens to them and we also die, at least they will identify them before burial.’
A Gazan mother staying at the Al-Hourani School in Khan Yunis says: ‘No child in Gaza deserves to live in conditions like these, without food and health security. If we don’t die in the war, we will die of the diseases and epidemics. In every classroom there are more than 60 people, children and mothers. Everything is crowded.’ She decided to leave her home in the northern Gaza Strip with her six children and headed south, but there too, she says, there bombings continued. ‘The children are really scared, alarmed by every movement,’ she says.
Alive, every morning
Nahed Abu-Taema, director of the Nasr Hospital in Khan Yunis, said in an interview with a Saudi newspaper that the medical teams around him are exhausted. ‘The wounded are coming to us every day, people who need surgery, hospitalization in intensive care,’ he says.
‘If the situation continues this way, it is a death sentence for the wounded and those who need medical services in Gaza.’ A spokesman for the Gazan Health Ministry, Dr. Ashraf al-Qidra, told the Palestinian news agency Shahab, ‘The non-entry of fuel for the hospitals in Gaza constitutes a real danger to the wounded and the sick.’
Rania, a mother of two and seven months pregnant, says: ‘The mothers and their children are always the first to be harmed.’ She worked as a nurse at the Red Cross Al-Quds Hospital in the al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, and at the start of the war went to stay with relatives in Khan Yunis. Her husband, also a nurse, remained in the northern Gaza Strip.
‘This is one of the most difficult decisions we have taken. We decided that I would stay with the children and every morning my husband sends a message so I will know he is alive.’ She says that some of the Gazans who moved to the southern part of the Strip are housed in improvised tents. ‘What will they do in the winter?’ she asks.
At the Al-Quds hospital there are five operating rooms, maternity wards and neonatal intensive care, dialysis and intensive care units. As of October 20, there were 400 patients and 12,000 evacuees there. Thus, of course, there is great concern about the poor sanitary conditions developing throughout the Strip. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs announced several days ago that in Gaza there are ‘cases of chicken pox, scabies and diarrhea, attributable to the poor sanitation conditions and consumption of water from unsafe sources.’ The UN office added: ‘The incidence of such diseases is expected to rise unless water and sanitation facilities are provided with electricity or fuel to resume operations.’
The Israeli NGO Gisha – Local Centers for Freedom of Movement, also warned last week about the state of vital infrastructure in Gaza: ‘Without electricity, water can’t be pumped and distributed. Israel’s bombardments have likely caused extensive damage to Gaza’s water infrastructure, which will make it difficult to access water even if the electricity and fuel supply is restored.’
Over the weekend, Physicians for Human Rights published an immediate warning about the conditions at Al-Quds Hospital. According to a press release from the organization, the director of the hospital reported that there had been an order to evacuate the hospital immediately, accompanied by a threat of immediate bombardment. Israel denied it had ordered evacuation of the hospital. According to the organization, Al-Quds Hospital serves half a million inhabitants of Gaza, and every day 120 to 140 wounded people arrive there.
Gaza of these past two weeks is one big cemetery. Among the thousands of dead are also people I knew from my work covering Arab culture. Among them is the young poet Hiba Abu Nada, who wrote the book ‘The Oxygen is Not for the Dead,’ about the blockade on the Gaza Strip. She was born in Saudi Arabia in 1991, the third generation of a family of refugees from the village of Beit Jirja, who were expelled in 1948. In the early 2000s her parents left Saudi Arabia and moved to Gaza.
In 2017 Abu Nida won the Palestinian Ministry of Culture short story prize. She lived in the prestigious al-Zahara neighborhood in northern Gaza, which was built in the 1990s on direct orders from the head of the Palestinian Authority at the time, Yasser Arafat. According to the BBC in Arabic, more than 25 buildings in the neighborhood have been bombed. ‘Between daylight and night, ‘the Green City’ has become a pile of ruins,’ said a witness to the destruction. ‘I worked my whole life in order to live there, and everything was destroyed in a moment. This is collective destruction.’