The evacuation of Gaza City is giving rise to images that are difficult to forget. More than a million people have had to leave their homes on the run, among ruins and with fear in their bodies after Israel’s ultimatum in the face of the imminent land, sea and air offensive on the capital. Their destination was south, along two corridors proposed by the Hebrew Army and supposedly safe.
Cars with their doors open so people could breathe, families piling their belongings into cars, groups of people walking on the side of the road… Scenes that look like those from a science fiction apocalypse spread across the Strip. To this must be added the problems of evacuating the hospitals, packed with wounded people. The latest reports from the Palestinian Ministry of Health put them at more than 9,000.
The country’s main hospital is precisely in the north, Al-Shifa, and it received the evacuation order with skepticism. They have been repeating for days that it is impossible to carry it out without putting their patients at risk. Many doctors have stayed to care for the most seriously ill, whose lives hang on the machines that are powered by generators with increasingly scarce diesel.
The situation in the south, the oasis of peace promised by Israel, is not much better, according to Palestinian media. Refugees arrive and crowd into every corner. At the Nasser hospital in the city of Khan Yunis, thousands of families occupy its courtyard. They have set up improvised tents with sheets and handkerchiefs, while neighbors bring them food and water, very precious goods in a Strip that is suffering from a draconian blockade.
Muhammad Qadeeh is one of those displaced. “We ran out of our house after the attack of dozens of missiles,” he told the newspaper ‘Feleesten’. Together with five other family members, he arrived at the United Nations refugee camp in the city but there was no longer room for them. So they found a place to sleep near the hospital. «We didn’t have blankets or bedding. “We sleep on the floor,” he says.
Neighborhood solidarity
There, under the trees of the garden, is also Abu Zar with his wife and children. “The neighbors have given us everything.” Together with hundreds of families they make up an improvised camp that is always pending. “We are afraid that they will kick us out or that bombs will fall,” they say.
For its part, the United Nations refugee organization admits that the situation is dramatic. They cannot cope with the people who have arrived in the south. 175,000 of them sleep in the schools it manages, but they are not enough. They have also asked the Israeli Army to commit to not attacking these facilities.
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